This essay analyses how Virginia Woolf's critically under-examined children's story about Nurse Lugton connects the becoming-artistic of writing to animal becomings. Examining the links between creativity and the other-than-human via Gilles Deleuze and Elizabeth Grosz, I claim that the ‘animation’ of the stitched animal figures on Nurse Lugton's ‘canvas’ reveals that art is the enlivenment of vibratory and affective qualities, as opposed to a monumentalising of symbols or concepts. Moreover, the curtain in Woolf's story should be read as creative materiality (...) itself, its folds participating in the self-varying dynamism of the virtual and actual. My analysis of the two published versions of the story, and their accompanying illustrations, outlines an affirmative bio-poetics at the heart of Woolf's aesthetic project and suggests that Woolf's creative sources are embedded in inhuman, biological forces. (shrink)

Choreographies of the Living explores the shift from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman's bioaesthetic framework describes how art-making binds us to other animals in literature, visual art, dance, and performance.