Tag: animals
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Darwin’s Polar Bear
Many people may be aware that the beaks of Galápagos “finches” (in fact, the islands’ mockingbirds) helped Charles Darwin to develop his ideas about evolution. But few people realize that the polar bear too, informed his grand theory. Letting his fancy run wild, in On the Origin of Species, the man used to thinking in…
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Hello, World: Making Nature at Wellcome Collection
Karl Reich’s 1913 recording of a nightingale – among the world’s earliest extant recordings of bird song – feels like a bottled metaphor for modernity. Trapped in shellac, this sweet twittering turned stand-in for nature, poetry and sex all at once, becomes a ghost of its living and mythical self, haunting us with questions of…
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Chroma Hunt
From cave drawings to medieval tapestry, classical pottery to Rubens or Rembrandt, the hunt has provided artists with powerful subject matter for thousands of years. Much of this power has to do with power: the physical prowess of early humanity, the great gods of Graeco-Roman mythology, or the wealth of the landed aristocracy of the…
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Extinction and the Image
Animals. The non-human kind. They are everywhere in an increasingly virtual world and more often not there in reality. Our eyes and minds seem instinctively to search out and recognise animal forms. Whether we experience a physical encounter or one mediated through the image, animals are insistent to us in their familiarity. So too in…
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Open Call: Wolf Crossing
In Finland there is a line around the city: susiraja, the wolf border. Within is law and order: shopping malls and social security. Beyond the susiraja lie the wilds and the wolves – just 200 at the last count. Who will howl in the forests when the last wolf departs? The susiraja may be inviolable…
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Being a Beast
Mankind has celebrated a close connection with the animal kingdom since our Stone Age ancestors dressed in furs and painted bison on cave walls. Mythology abounds with tales of creatures which are half-man, half-beast, from werewolves to centaurs. In the transition from hunter-gatherers to city dwellers, we have gradually lost touch with the land, becoming…
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The Paper Zoo
Choosing to draw: philosophy and aesthetics Whatever else the Romans may have done for us, teaching us to draw was not one of their gifts. The two great works of classical scholarship on animals were Aristotle’s History of Animals, and Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia. Neither Pliny nor his Greek predecessor included any illustrations in…
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Epicormic Psychology
The regeneration of Australia’s flora and fauna after fire is swift; or is this just a misconception of a nation’s psyche? The winding trail of sandstone rubble ascends before me through a pocket of dorsal-fin shaped bushland in Lapstone, in Australia’s Blue Mountains. This ecosystem is not granted a name. Even though it…
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An Orgy of Toads
Soon after the clocks have gone forward and April Fools has passed, a spring event occurs which has yet to capture the popular imagination in quite the same way as eggs and rabbits. From the sodden depths of secret muddy highways, frogs and toads descend on their annual breeding grounds. For one unnerving week I…
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The Courtiers’ Anatomists
What did it mean to experiment with animals in the seventeenth century? There is much ambiguity surrounding the terms “demonstration,” “experience,” and “experiment” in this period, further complicated by linguistic ambiguity: “expérience” in French and “experientia” in Latin could mean what we know in modern English as either experience or experiment. The medieval term “experimentum”…
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Dolly
Everyone on Prospect Walk knew Pat Steggles had a problem with drink; it wasn’t just me. For as long as I’d known her she’d always had a glass in her hand, and I often saw her carrying an empty Martini bottle down Wellington Lane to the off-license for a refill. Nobody could fail to notice…