Animal Print Suicide' is a 1,600 word text initially written for 'Printmare: Against Nature' a publication and show curated by Finlay Taylor at Camberwell Space (2014) in which Coutts also exhibited. This text has now been revised for the forthcoming Manchester University Press anthology of writings on contemporary print (edited by Ruth Pelzer, 2018).

Coutts’ illustrated essay works through examples of mimetic practices and ideologies to expand on questions of the positioning of the printmaker in relation to their images, and in turn that of the viewer. ‘Animal Print Suicide’ looks to Hélène Cixous’s writings on vets and their sometimes over-identification with the animals they treat as analogous to the repeated image inhabiting and influencing their maker. Elias Canetti’s studies of animals and masks, and Hito Steyerl’s probing of the vantage point of the viewer, as our digital platforms become ever more complex, are also re-evaluated. As print techniques become more viable for 3D applications, and therefore result in objects with a persuasive physical presence, Coutts argues that it is becoming increasingly difficult to discern where printed matter ends and the world begins and vice versa.