Heroes and Martyrs Series

What happens to a legend when we remove humanity from the story?

In the Heroes and Martyrs series, I replace human protagonists with animals, using familiar symbols of heroism, sacrifice, violence, and reverence to construct narratives that feel at once recognizable and strangely unfamiliar. By shifting these stories into the animal world, I am interested in how legends are born, what remains of our myths, and what they reveal about the humans who created them.

With the first piece in this series, a martyr, I discovered that the substitution of an animal fundamentally changed the way viewers responded to the narrative. The audience reacted with a mixture of horror and sympathy. Faced with an animal bearing the wounds of a martyr, viewers expressed sadness and protection—responses such as “poor thing” revealed an instinctive sense that the animal was vulnerable and unable to defend itself.

In classic depictions of human martyrs, there is often an acceptance of the suffering borne by the protagonist. The figure’s pain is understood within a larger narrative of faith, sacrifice, conviction, or redemption. When that same visual language is applied to an animal, however, those assumptions become unsettled. Rather than accepting the suffering as meaningful or chosen, the viewer may see only vulnerability. The animal becomes someone—or something—to protect.

This response has become central to the series. I want to create enough distance from our familiar heroic narratives to see them differently. Animals do not carry our histories, ideologies, or inherited ideas of glory in quite the same way. Their presence allows the symbolism to become strange again, exposing the assumptions we bring to stories of heroism, sacrifice, violence, and power.

What do our legends become when we replace humanity with animals? And what might these new legends reveal about the stories we tell ourselves about heroism, sacrifice, and power?