My research project ‘Mourning Auks’ explores how artistic practice can contribute to the narrative/storytelling methodologies currently employed within the environmental humanities to tell ‘extinction stories’. These critical creative-academic ‘stories’ use narrative to explore the unique circumstances of species’ individual life-worlds, and their decline and disappearance. In doing so they aim to hold open up a space for the ethical consideration of what it means for a particular way of life to be made to disappear.

Through an archivally-based case study on the great auk (an extinct puffin-like flightless seabird) I seek to experiment with how creative methods might contribute to this ethical work by expanding its communicative reach. However, I also recognise the potential role these creative methods might play beyond the simple dissemination of this existing research using new ‘artistic’ outcomes. That is, how through working creatively and imaginatively around this subject we might open up new practices for engaging with the emotional spaces extinction occupies in the present.