Samantha Clark is a visual artist working with the Natural History Collections of Edinburgh University School of Biological Sciences
Saturday, 27 June 2009
Exploded Rabbit
Rummaging in the Curator's room is full of moments of surprise - I found this propped inside a cupboard on the very top shelf, only visible from the teetering top step of the ladder.
This project will explore the relationships between scientific and aesthetic responses to the objects in the Natural History Collection, as a site for the production of knowledge about the natural world.
A blindworm bleached and suspended in a spirit jar; a wax scale model of a fish brain on a turned ebony handle; a calculation of the mass in cubic miles of salt in the world’s oceans written in a careful copperplate hand on a glass lantern slide: these objects are now distanced from modern scientific approaches by perhaps a century, and now seem strangely poetic. Each specimen is a fragment of ‘the wild’ that became ‘science’ and is now ‘history’.
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