About me

 

My interest in taxidermy began as a fascination with both its animal-objects, lingering old and musty beyond their natural course, and my particular interest in the aesthetic side of the natural and unnatural sciences.  During my studies I have focussed on philosophies which endeavour to explain and order phenomena, especially those for which the aesthetic power of an idea is equally important as the supposed knowledge the system seeks to generate.  Lists, hierarchies, archaic medical philosophies, webs of interconnections, and esoteric structures worldly forms and motions.  For some early astronomers, the ancient belief that the celestial spheres followed perfectly circular paths - pure and eternal motion as Aristotle had believed - was even harder to give up then an earth-centred universe. Some ideas are too beautiful not to be true.

I view taxidermy as such a philosophy for making sense of the world about us. Messy and obscure, surely, but it remains a material act of elucidation. In a sense, taxidermy presents the perfect blend of aesthetics and science and an exemplary case of how, when the two come together, they create something totally unique, frequently wrong, and altogether compelling. What is taxidermy? Art, nature, or science?  Something happens when the three occur in the same form, and this blog is part of my larger investigation to figure out what precisely that something is.

In 2005, I completed my Ph.D. from the Programme of Comparative Literature at the University of British Columbia. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, my thesis, “To make the stubborn Clod relent: Climate, Culture, and Cultivation in Early Modern England,” investigates cultural interpretations of climate and nature in seventeenth-century England. I also hold a B.F.A. in painting and printmaking from the University of British Columbia, a Post-Baccalaureate in painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and a Masters in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities from Stanford University, during which time I focussed on material culture and early modern cabinets of curiosity. I have worked with collections at various galleries and museums including the Medical Division of Stanford Special Collections, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Diane Farris Art Gallery in Vancouver, and the Vancouver Museum.

I am currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at M.I.T. and writing a cultural history of taxidermy entitled Taxidermy and Longing, to be published by Harvard University Press in 2010.  I am also a guest curator at the Vancouver Museum preparing an exhibition of the cultures of taxidermy opening in 2009.

Please contact me with your opinions and sightings at ravishingbeasts@gmail.com.

 

Publications:

 

2008.   "The Matter and Meaning of Museum Taxidermy," museum & society 6:2. [online: http://www.le.ac.uk/ms/museumsociety.html - choose Issue 6, volume 2 from the left menu]

2008.   "Ophelia by the Idiots" reprinted from ravishingbeasts in Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, 7. [online: http://www.antennae.org.uk/ANTENNAE%20ISSUE%207.doc.pdf

2008.   "Hunting the Windy Vapors" (a medical history of the windy passions), The Believer 6:8. Read here +

2008.   "Objects of Loss and Remembrance," an excerpt from my forthcoming book: Taxidermy and Longing and "Ravishing Beasts," an interview with Rachel Poliquin, both published in Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, 6. Special edition: Rogue Taxidermy. [online: http://www.antennae.org.uk/ANTENNAE%20ISSUE%206.doc.pdf]

2007.   "The Visual Erotics of the Mini-Marriage" (a cross-eyed history of cute), The Believer 5:9, 3-8. [online version: http://www.believermag.com/issues/200711/]

2005.   "Vegetal Prejudice in Early Modern England," Textual Healing: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Medicine. ed. Elizabeth Furdell. Leiden: Brill Academic Press, 169-193

2004 BOOK REVIEW:  "Dissecting Disciplinarity," Canadian Literature. 182: 141-143. (Titles reviewed: Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, and The Living Prism: Itineraries in Comparative Literature)

2003.   "Self-Constructing Geographies or How to Author the World," The Supplément. 1.1. [online: http://complit.arts.ubc.ca/magazine.vol1.1/poliquin1.htm]

2003 BOOK REVIEW:  "Curious Knowledge," Canadian Literature. 179: 115-118. (Titles reviewed: The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and their Collectors, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, and The Oxford Companion to the Body) [online: http://www.canlit.ca/reviews-review.php?id=11539

2002 BOOK REVIEW:  "The Alphabet of Suffering," Canadian Literature. 174: 117-119. (Titles reviewed: Idioglossia and The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth- Century English Culture)