Tuesday 21 September 2010

still alive (dead)




I can't promise to write about anything other than taxidermy for ages. I am still loving Still Life, and I am on a chapter about Potter's Museum of Curiosities, which was sold off in tragic bits and bobs a few years ago, which is a story I remember from Classic Angling, which reported from the auction (giant tuna head, among others). When the stupid Smithsonian needed to clear out its whale hall, the blue whale ended up on eBay.

And yesterday, looking for a picture of the Reynard thing underneath, I blundered across Ravishing Beasts, where Rachel Poliquin posts regular updates of a project which began as a doctoral thesis at MIT, and which had (I dare say) its culmination at an Poliquin-curated exhibition last winter at the Museum of Vancouver, which I would love above almost all things to have gone to.

The pictures are relentlessly excellent. How about those stags? How about that crochedermy? Rachel Poliquin and Melissa Milgrom are my current heroes.

2 comments:

slepkane said...

I'm guessing you've been here:
http://crappytaxidermy.com/
(For "crappy" read "astounding")

Robert Hudson said...

Good guess. It is magnificent. Some of it is crappy. Some of it is brilliant. Lots of it is astounding.