Rory Daniel (born 1969)

Rory Daniel is an Australian lens-based artist.

His practice explores the invisible animal in all of us, and what is made possible by dropping the human mask that keeps us veiled.

His body of work responds to Terror Management Theory, and explores the disinclination of humans to act like animals; A self-preservation strategy to deny human mortality.

He focuses on how photography is used as illusion and delusion, the threshold between man and beast, and how these impact the destiny of the human species. 

He combines photography and performance, using Butoh dance as “speculative fabulation” to invent and imagine the future. 

Born in Perth, he now shares his time between Singapore and Melbourne, straddling the commercial and artistic worlds with his photographic practice.

His works include “Fragment” - a series of images that reveal a view of the future as told by a mysterious light phenomena. He attempts to conjure human animals from strangers of the street in the “Invocation of the Inner Animal” project, and endeavours to re-invent the human body in “I am an Animal”.