Making Nature: How we see animals
Wellcome Collection
01 December 2016 – 21 May 2017
This is an exhibition that explores our relationship with nature with a focus on our own perceptions of animals and how this inevitably affects the way in which we treat them, emphasising the symbiosis that has existed between humans and animals for thousands of years.
Through an exhibition of over one hundred intriguing objects from art and science, ranging from taxidermy, film, photography and literature, it invites the visitor to explore the phycology of how we think, feel and value other species and the ultimate consequence of this.
It is arranged across four rooms: ‘Ordering’, ‘Displaying’, ‘Observing’ and ‘Making’. The first room focuses on our obsession with classification, and displays the father of modern natural history, Carl Linnaeus’s classification of flora and fauna into family, genus and species.
Rooms two and three focus on our need to observe and display animals, most commonly to their deprivation. Included here are many taxidermied animals in a variety of settings from recreations of their ‘natural’ habitat to contrasting scenes of stuffed mice dressed in human clothing playing cards!
The last room explores animals that have been fundamentally altered by humans, such as the genetically modified canary’s bred for their colour or the skull of a goat who was genetically modified to produce spider silk proteins in her milk.
This is an exhibition about a complex human relationship we have with animals bordering somewhere between the need to control and the need to love. This issue of control and maintenance is a recurring theme within my own practice, and it spans from a landscaped garden to the confines of a zoo. By Romanising nature we create unrealistic expectations and by trying to fulfil those requirements we are destroying the very thing we love. This exhibition carries a powerful message on the lack of sustainability in the way we view nature and debates that human activity is ultimately having a negative impact on the planet.
