nanoq: flat out and bluesome
a survey of British taxidermic polar bears 2001-04
Polar bears found in UK museums and private collections constitute a legacy of over two hundred years of enterprise and colonial sorties on the arctic environment
nanoq: flat out and bluesome, is a project conceived in four parts, and was developed over five years.
- The first part was a survey of taxidermic polar bears in the British Isles, undertaken by the artists with the assistance of museum curators and keepers of natural history collections throughout the country. (2000-2004)
Most collections with bears have one or two specimens - in themselves providing only glimpses of a history, not only of their killing, but of an attitude to predators which Western colonists carried all over the world - one of suspicion and machismo, of implicit superiority and simultaneously of fear
- The second aim was to photograph the bears. (2000-2004) The archive comprises 34 framed, medium format colour photographs of the polar bears in situ in their respective public and private collections and settings, together with the provenances of the specimens
The contexts of the respective specimens range from cluttered natural history displays through the measured, grand arrangements of colonial artifacts in stately homes to the genuinely domestic and unpretentious surroundings of private homes. Some are in storage, some neglected and some undergoing restoration. Each framed photograph incorporates a text recounting as much as is known of the provenance of the specimen, its place and date of capture or shooting, the name of the person responsible, the purpose of the particular expedition, its history in captivity, its age on death etc
- The third aim was to make an installation comprising ten of the bears in a converted industrial or light-industrial art space. The amassing of these bear specimens was accomplished through negotiations conducted over a period of three years. (2004, Spike Island, Bristol)
During the five-week life of the installation the artists organised a one-day conference (White Out) at which four invited speakers, an audience and the artists themselves discussed issues around the many associated themes prompted by the project - museology and display, taxidermy, the colonial impulse, arctic exploration, the whaling industry, subsistence and trophy hunting, shifting attitudes to environment etc
- The fourth part of the project was to bring all of the information gathered during the project, the provenances, the photographic archive, documentation of the installation together in the pages of a publication together with essays from those speakers and writers who took part in the conference. (2006, Black Dog Publishing)
A little more about the images and the project:
The polar bears were photographed as they were when we found them. In each museum they are arranged and regarded in a different way. In the Hancock Museum, Newcastle, the display is set up with animals on or around an 'Ark' - the polar bear is roaming on the flats to one side, next to a lion, a deer, a bison and a host of other animals of disparate origin. In Kendal the polar bear, shot by (the local) Lord Lonsdale stands up aggressively with a painted arctic image in the background. Next to it is a deer head and a glass-cased musk ox. In Eureka the polar bear, originally brought to Dundee, is partly hidden, high up in the building in an 'attic' display amongst bicycles, a Victorian rocking horse and an old hoover. It stands at the back, half-hidden looking out of the glass-panelled building onto the park below. In Hull the bear has a painted image of a polar bear behind it and to one side there is a skeleton of a juvenile polar bear in a glass case. Against this case is a 19th Century image of a bear standing next to its dead mother on board a whaling ship.
The project also addresses the notion of these bears as a symbol of status: many were shot for instance by members of the aristocracy and as a consequence they were brought to private estates. We photographed them just as we found them, very often amongst a disparate collection of historical and colonial artifacts. Some displays were under construction and this contemporary adjustment and reinterpretation informs part of the work.
Importantly, the display of these animals in such a variety of ways leaves
us caught in limbo. Clearly we are confused as to what to do with the legacy.
It is no longer possible to see the bear as an animal in the way perhaps we
might have done before moving pictures and sumptuous wildlife documentaries.
So what is it to us now? It was our intention to raise questions about our perceptions
of the north, of power in nature, in culture and the tendency of images to supplant
reality.
The displacement of the bears from their space within each collection to a
temporary grouping, stripped of interpretation; the photographic framing of
the context in which they now exist and their multiple return in this form to
a museum context, all underpin and attest to the artists' new exploration, their
new hunt, which in some small way mirrors the original act; an act we would
commonly now regard as destructive and entirely transgressive.
Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson