During Frieze Week 2025, as London’s art world gathered to celebrate creativity and commerce, the streets told a different story. Interdisciplinary artist Stephanie Lane – founder of SPECIESISM.WTF – transformed the city into a site of protest and reckoning with her public performance THE MILKING HERD, an unflinching act of art as activism that confronted the cruelty of the dairy industry and humanity’s normalized exploitation of non-human mothers.
The large-scale, participatory performance featured 45 women embodying “milked commodities”, moving together as living sculptures through London’s streets. Their slow, deliberate procession symbolised the forced, endless cycle endured by dairy cows – inseminated against their will, separated from their calves within hours of birth, and milked until their bodies give out. These “commodified mothers” are then slaughtered once their production declines, a truth the industry hides behind sanitized marketing of pastoral bliss and maternal imagery.
Through this embodied protest, Lane’s work exposes the profound violence embedded in everyday consumption, rupturing the illusion that milk is a benign or ethical product. The piece traced the invisible journey of dairy cows – from confinement to transport, from birth to death – making visible the suffering our society works hard to keep out of sight.
“For me, every move and breath is art, and with that comes responsibility,” Lane explains. “My existence, my purpose, is to rupture, not entertain. To expose the hidden economy of suffering our culture normalises, and even glamorises. THE MILKING HERD confronts the brutality of the dairy industry, dismantling the lie of disposability. Legacy, for me, is not reputation; it is leaving a fracture in our species’ delusion of supremacy.”
The work’s power lies in its synthesis of vulnerability and defiance. The performers’ bodies, unified yet individual, mirrored the exploited mothers of the dairy industry – beings treated as mere machinery for profit. Each step through London’s commercial and cultural epicentres became a demand for recognition, a reminder that compassion cannot coexist with domination.
THE MILKING HERD continues SPECIESISM.WTF’s mission to challenge speciesist hierarchies through radical art, calling into question the systems of violence that underpin human identity, culture, and consumption. It was a haunting, necessary intervention during one of the art world’s most celebrated weeks – a stark reminder that true creativity does not decorate oppression; it dismantles it.
Photography by Calvin J Tasker