As animals we live for a relatively short period of time and it is hard to visualise the world being particularly different from what we know, but the world has always changed. Animal development has been shaped by alternating warm and cold periods. Each time that the temperature warms, animals and grasslands migrate north, replacing the existing residents. Most living things in most parts of the world are temporary residents. This series imagines how former residents might appear in a local natural world.

The images of the animals are made in my studio in Oxford or in a set-up that I construct closer to the animal. They are photographed against a plain backdrop. Often animals are nervous, which necessitated the creation of a backdrop, and then leaving it for a week or more. I might introduce lights, slowly building a set, in which the animal is comfortable; for example, the zebra image was made over a period of 5 weeks.

Once I have the animal image, it is layered and blended with multiple landscape images that I have previously made in Port Meadow, an area that I am very familiar with and where I walk daily. In an early 20th century archaeological dig, the bones of a woolly rhinoceros were found here. There is evidence that hyena and tiger hunted in this area. Animals that today we regard with exotic curiosity formerly lived locally.

This series explores an animal’s relationship with land. Landscape is not just something we know but something we are. If memories of sensing, moving and emotion in landscape are removed or changed, then we become something else. We are in the landscape and it is in us.

The world has existed for so long and our perception of it so short that we cannot deny the possibility of a tapir pawing the meadow near us. Imagining such possibilities is a first step in accepting, and even celebrating the new, the unfamiliar and the disconcerting.

Prof Chris Gosden/Rory Carnegie