These tiny dogs, examples of Victorian taxidermy, were on display at Hall Place in Bexley, Kent.
There is something so appealing about the miniature, but it questions our expectations when scale is distorted beyond what feels natural.
Although there were attempts by the Victorians to breed such minute specimens these particular ones are fakes. An X-ray proves a lack of skeleton.
VictorianTaxidermy
These strange little creatures were an appropriate taster for the exhibition ‘Beastly Hall’, inspired by the resident topiary of the Queen’s Beasts.
The Queen’s Beasts
Originally carved in stone to commemorate the Queen’s coronation in 1953, these living sentinels are based on real and mythical creatures.
Artists had been selected for the exhibition who explored all aspects of what might be considered something ‘beastly’.
HyungKoo Lee works in reverse to the Victorian taxidermist – he creates a fake skeleton.
Hyungkoo Lee ‘Ridicularis’
Transporting Goofy from popular culture to natural history.
Carsten Holler’s Red Walrus has a cartoon appearance with its plasticised body and unnatural colouring.
Carsten Holler ‘Red Walrus’
It has however been given human eyes which gaze out from within a fabricated world.
Joana Vasconcelos takes a kitsch ornament and adds another skin, a layer of decoration.
Joana Vasconcelos ‘Flibbertigibbet’
We were told when we got our cat – it is not an ornament, don’t expect it to behave like one.
Thomas Grunfeld has created a whole series of ‘Misfits’ through mixing species.
Thomas Grunfeld ‘Misfits’
Questioning our manipulation of nature.
Thomas Grunfeld ‘Misfits’
Creating a modern mythology.
Thomas Grunfeld ‘Misfits’
Exploring the fear of genetic engineering and what it might create.
Polly Morgan doesn’t always deal in horror but in ‘Blue Fever’ the melding together of so many bodies through a thrashing of wings creates something disturbing.
Polly Morgan ‘Blue Fever’
An entity that cannot breathe, suspended in continuous flight with no escape.
Tessa Farmer explores flesh under attack.
Tessa Farmer ‘A wounded Herring Gull’
Her trademark tiny skeletons in league with the insect world bring down a much larger life force.
Tessa Farmer
Claire Morgan’s installation of blue bottles suspended in flight creates a geometric order from an association of disgust, germs and disease.
Claire Morgan ‘Heart of Darkness’
Damien Hirst puts the visceral into the kitsch.
Damien Hirst ‘Sacred Heart (with hope)’
Hope and treachery are preserved in perpetual limbo.
I really liked Rachel Goodyear’s delicate drawings of spirits escaping earthly vessels.
Rachel Goodyear
Her drawings incorporate 3D paper cuts which flow out from and off the page.
Rachel Goodyear
Her organic ceramic pieces hold strange images, transitory moments like worrisome memories best tucked away.
Rachel Goodyear ‘curling up into more comfortable positions’
The spiritual theme is continued with Jodie Carey’s funeral flowers bleached of colour.
Jodie Carey
These flowers are made of plaster, chiffon and ground up bone,
Throughout the exhibition there is the uplifting sound of birdsong.
It comes from Matt Collishaw’s truncated tree trunks where LP’s mimicking the age rings of trees spin and fill the space with the sounds of woodland.
Matt Collishaw ‘Total Recall’
The birds recorded are actually mimicking chain saws. With this knowledge the jolly suddenly becomes sinister.
Susie MacMurray filled a room with peacock feathers echoing the crowds drawn to watch the spectacle of the coronation.
Susie MacMurray ‘Spectacle’
These fragile remains of the male peacocks display act as an unexpected barrier.
Susie MacMurray ‘Spectacle’
The idea of the voyeur is further expressed by Francis Alys in his footage of a fox let loose in The National Portrait Gallery.
Francis Alys ‘The Nightwatch’
Trapped and confined to relentless meanderings the fox is exposed to the sort of CCTV surveillance that we are subject to as we traverse the city while similarly unaware of our voyeurs.
Peter Blake’s ‘Tarzan Box’ from 1965 expresses a clash of cultures and clichéd fears of what the exotic might hold.
Peter Blake ‘Tarzan Box’
The exploration of dark spaces could reveal fantastical creatures of horror.
Charles Avery ‘Duculi (The Indescribable)’
There were also lots of artists showing at the Venice Biennale who engage in fantasy and myth.
Levi Fisher Ames sculpted his fantastical creatures in wood and displayed them as specimens in glass cases.
Levi Fisher Ames
‘Animals Wild and Tame – Whittled Out of Wood – Nothing Like It Shown Anywhere’
Levi Fisher Ames
Ames took his collection on tour around Wisconsin in the 1880’s telling outlandish tales about his creatures to his audience while simultaneously carving more figures.
Severely autistic Shinichi Sawada has created a very personal mythology with his clay figures.
Shinichi Sawada
These beasts look like they come from a ritualistic and totemic past, but are recent creations, combining spiky defence in a fragile form.
Domenico Gnoli’s beasts also ‘hail from a vast storehouse in the human imagination’.
Domenico Gnoli
His series of drawings ‘What is a Monster’ from 1967 place surrealist creatures into everyday settings.
Anna Zemankova is growing flowers that are not grown anywhere else.
Anna Zemankova
Produced during frantic early morning reveries she allowed her mind to flow freely recalling cultural influences entwined in her fantasies.
Ivan Morison also loves to create myths. His talk at the Whitechapel Gallery was peppered with stories of the fantastical, almost believable sort. Is there really a village in Italy that strings goats up from a tree and shoots at them? Was the world’s biggest dinosaur really the victim of arson? Storytelling is part of the work and has been formalised in the traveling puppet theatre of Mr Clevver, based on a character from the post-apocalyptic novel, Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.
Heather and Ivan Morrison
Another of the Morrison’s escape vehicles. They travel through rural landscapes setting up camp unannounced and putting on a show to whichever locals turn up..
Heather and Ivan Morrison
Telling stories that blend factual recall with fiction, merging information into a narrative that builds on the mythology of their own lives and also the lives of people they encounter.
Out of its time, part medieval part futuristic, Mr Clevver is an evolving work about the coming together of different people in differing places.
‘Mr Clevver’ Ivan and Heather Morrison
Kay Harwood showing at Simon Oldfield Gallery also deals in mystery and suggestion.
Kay Harwood
Exploring iconography and mythology her paintings have a wonderful pure surface, like porcelain. The muted and restricted palette gives a timeless quality.
Kay Harwood
These men look like contemporary apostles in meditation on some spiritual truth.
The quest for inner retrospection. A solitary wanderer.
I wanted to capture something of an enchanted wood in these images.
These are screen prints with sublimation inks transferred onto polyester. I printed 3 layers separately onto paper and then heat-pressed them on top of each other blending the colours.
Layering the shadow of a rose garden on organza over the grey woods.
I have been thinking about whether to add a figure in the woods.
Also have been working on one ‘return of the forest ‘ collagraph, cutting sublimation printed organza onto the collagraph.
The forests disappeared under the advancing ice and then reappeared as the ice retreated.
Going back to a time before civilization, before religion. Right back to the beginning to see where the first dislocation took place, looking back for the myth of living in harmony with nature in some idyllic context and the start of nostalgia.
Thinking about fantastical creatures and myth has been helpful for the new work I am planning about beasts of the forest.
Susan Eyre 