C-type print, 100x100cm, edition of 15

`Only in death do most animals pause long enough for our analytical minds to torture some truths out of them` - Stephen Asma, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads

Taxidermy and photography both allow energy and stillness to coexist.

In the 21st century there is a changing relationship with animals. No longer do we hunt an animal, stuff it and place it on show. The production process of collection, display and taxonomy has largely become defunct due to evolving environmental attitudes and perceptions. Our wider perspective of natural history, offered to us by film, photography and travel, questions and re-orientates a new way of considering animals outside the confines of the old systems of order. `The Quickening` is pieced together from specimens and taxidermy photographed from various Natural History museums across the country, re-activating these objects and giving them a new purpose.

`The Quickening` renegotiates the ideologies of the Natural History Museum and the cataloguing of the natural world, exploring the current understanding of nature compared with the British exploration and collecting of the nineteenth century. By no longer looking at taxidermy or specimens through the eyes of “Natural History”, this project realises that, in an increasingly endangered natural environment, the further we move away from nature, the closer we want to be.