Abstract

The purpose of my thesis is to explore the strange, seductive, and often complicated world of museum taxidermy. More specifically, the research aims to examine what roles art-making (in the form of participatory in-museum practice and subsequent studio-based research-creation) can play in conversations around taxidermied animals, and how these acts of art-making contribute to the generation of knowledge about the cultural display of animal bodies and wider discourses surrounding animal issues. This thesis has been realized in two distinct phases, firstly a participatory/collaborative art making museum intervention at the Redpath Museum at McGill University. The second phase of this research has been centred on the creation of a series of research-creation artworks, embodying and reconstructing the museum intervention and surrounding scholarship. Both phases have centred on four specimens of zoological museum taxidermy on display at the Redpath; a polar bear, a gorilla, a whooping crane, and a beaver diorama. Overall, the intervention at the Redpath Museum resulted in engaging a myriad of discourses around animal bodies activated as social objects. These discourses were then re-constructed and further disseminated through a process of research-creation in the form of eight mixed-method watercolour paintings/collages. These paintings/collages re-conceptualized the Redpath Museum itself as functioning as a kind of diorama, in order to highlight the differing contexts involved in the cultural display of animal bodies in museum spaces versus the lives of animals in the wild.