scarlet seamstress works
from the beating heart outward
hare formed from fine twine
It was the last weekend of Animals Inside Out at the Natural History Museum. I popped down early on Saturday to check it out.
I’d previously been to see Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds exhibition many years ago when it first toured London. I have a both an admiration, yet a certain ambivalence to his work. I guess, and preposterous as it sounds, despite my love and support of science, there is still some deep seated superstition within me which makes me uneasy around death. Especially when the corpses (plastinised or not) are playing flippin’ tennis or something equally mundane.
Luckily, there wasn’t a giant squid playing tennis against a bull in this exhibition. It was educational, with a real art aesthetic that made you gasp and look deeply. The animals all had died of natural causes, but it still made me sad to see such magnificent animals displayed in this way. The elephant seemed especially haunting somehow. Not because von Hagens had done anything wrong, it just seems sad that so many animals are at threat of extinction and soon our knowledge of them will be driven from travelling sideshows such as these.
The pedestals with the small animals, such as the Hare below were beautiful. Every capillary captured. The tiny tracks of where blood once flowed.
I also popped next door, to the Science Museum, where they had an Alan Turing exhibition. This is Alan Turing year, it would have been his 100th birthday. What a genius. What a sad story.
