Ann Quinn: The Last Wolf

Throughout my life I have had a yearning for wilderness and wild creatures.

 

When growing up in East Donegal, the landscape of cultivated land and farming was never quite enough for me. Wolves had been eradicated by the 18th century but they came into the stories my older siblings read to me. I was deeply affected when my border collie disappeared when I was 9 years old. Animals both wild and domesticated have become an important presence in my art.

 

In the winter of 2023 I spent a month at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. This artists' residency is situated on a 20,000 acres cattle ranch in northeast Wyoming at the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, close to the border of Montana. Here, too, wolves had been eradicated; the last recorded native wolf was shot in Wyoming in 1943.

After I returned to Ireland I was haunted for a long time by this - imagining the loneliness of being the last one of your species in the land.

 

Hunting is part of country life in both places, Donegal and Wyoming. I grew up with a tradition of hunting fox, pheasant and hare which has been part of the culture of East Donegal since the 1800's.

In Wyoming, the sight and sound of hunters in orange vests, and the constant noise of gunshots during deer culling season reminded me daily of the absence of the rightful hunter, the wolf. I was even given a hunter orange vest for my daily hikes so the hunters would see me in the landscape but the deer - blind to this colour - would not. It made me belong to the hunters, not the hunted.

This exhibition is an amalgam of these places and experiences, as well as an homage to wolves and all wild creatures.

- Ann Quinn, 2025