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| Silhouette of Boxing Kangaroos by artist Rod McCrae at Everglades House. |
Our interactions with animals range from compassionate to
cruel, but the truth is that the majority of human animal interactions are
unseen and overlooked.
The impact of our behaviour on biodiversity, the
wellbeing of the environment including the climate, and the animals we use
every day can be extraordinary yet often goes unremarked on. Our minor habits
can have major consequences for other creatures, whole species even.
Last week I had the pleasure of viewing a confronting
exhibition by former children’s book artist and taxidermist Rod McCrae called Wunderkammer (“cabinet of wonders”).
McCrae explains his title thus:
“Wonder seems like such an outmoded notion in our technological age where everything is so readily explained by the scientific method. Wonder however does exist in the human imagination often triggered, yet not fully explained, by an object. Rachel Poliquin’s The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing (2012) puts it thus: “From early cabinets of wonder to philosophical repositories, collections of curiosities never really displayed knowledge, rather they acted as warehouses of raw potentiality.”
One of the questions this exhibit raised for me is
whether we see animals as mere curiosities – when we pay attention to them at
all.
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Taxidermy is a fraught art form for me because, historically,
many animals were killed as trophies, only to be stuffed and preserved as
curiosities by those wishing to tame and control nature or at least cram it
into a museum in an ironic, obsessive attempt to document every living species
before it disappears off the face of the Earth.
But this isn’t ordinary taxidermy. There are signs
throughout the exhibition insisting that the animals were ethically sourced: “No
animal has been harmed to make this work in the first instance; the skins are
the result of death by natural causes, medical euthanasia, hunting, culling and
food production and have been traded on, sometimes multiple times before they
became part of this body of work. The skins of the antelopes and the baboon are
the byproducts of trophy taking.”
These aren’t animals arranged like trophies. Rather
they are displayed in a way that raises questions like what do we mean by humankind's dominion over animals? What responsibilities does that entail? What does stewardship mean and have we got it wrong? Why do we often
see animals as waste?
If you have an interest in human animal interactions,
this is a relatively small but very powerful exhibition. You can read more
about the work here.
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| The Gardens at Everglades House. |
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| The original owners shifted a 40 tonne boulder to create this pool. |
You can catch Wunderkammer at Everglades House, part of
the historic house trust, in Leura (about a two-hour train trip from Sydney)
til August 27 (its a very beautiful spot for a picnic).
