MANDY DARRINGTON
Five swimsuit-clad girls play in a circle, exchanging cheerful glances at one another as three large wolves prowl amongst them—not as objects of fear or apprehension, but as companions. On the ground between these human and animal figures is a twisted mass of gore; bones and entrails lay strewn about, pulled and rent by the wolves to the utter ambivalence of the children beside them. Though their physical appearances may differ, the scene creates the impression that the attendants of this savage feast are more alike than meets the eye. The girls are as much a part of nature as a part of human society.
This uncanny image is one of many related scenes drawn from the mind of Mandy Darrington, an Idaho-born ecofeminist artist whose large-scale copperplate intaglio prints work to illuminate forms of patriarchal, colonial rhetoric centered on the simultaneous animalization of women and feminization of nature. Ideas like these are an integral part of the mythology of the American frontier. They are thus very personal to Darrington, whose childhood was spent playing in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains and inflected by the region’s history of settler colonization. Indeed, the scenes she creates of girls and wolves are not entirely imagined—she designs them through a photomontage process by superimposing images of wolves onto her own childhood photographs.
In this way, Darrington uses her practice to re-contextualize her youth: she acknowledges her animal nature but refuses consent to her own domestication, instead treating her “feral” childhood as a time of freedom and self-expression in which she could literally and metaphorically “play ‘animal’” before the social expectations of female adolescence were thrust upon her. This perspective, taken alongside the sense of kinship Darrington reveals between herself and the wolves that appear throughout her oeuvre, serves to deconstruct anthropocentric notions of separation and hierarchy between humanity and nature, reflecting Darrington’s fundamental belief that environmental issues are women’s issues and vice-versa.
— Mia Kivel, OSU Department of History of Art, PhD Student
EXHIBITION DOCUMENTATION BY SAM LO, OSU MFA PHOTOGRAPHY 2026