Aside from the national museums, natural history museums do not typically have the same habit of producing catalogues for their exhibitions as art museums do. So when we came to consider one for our current exhibition at the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge, we didn’t have many models for comparison.
Evolution as Inspiration is an exhibition of artworks by Jonathan Kingdon, one of the world’s greatest and most prolific naturalists. Kingdon was born in Tanzania in 1935 and has spent his life observing animals in the wild, chiefly in Africa.
The exhibition is divided into two sections, revealing two of Kingdon’s approaches to his art. First, displayed among the skeletons and skins of our permanent displays, are Kingdon’s detailed and immaculate anatomical drawings, made over several decades of dissecting hundreds of animal carcasses. They reflect a period in which he was attempting to understand how animals “work” under the skin.
The second half of the exhibition is based on Kingdon’s scientific analysis of how and why animals’ external appearances have come to be. Through a lifetime of detailed study of living animals in the field, he has proposed answers to questions such as why the zebra is so strikingly striped, how certain groups of birds evolved to show such a diversity of forms, and why vultures’ heads resemble rotting flesh. Kingdon has developed a wealth of vivid artistic practices that seek to explore and explain some of the hows and whys of animal evolution.
The exhibition was a collaboration between Kingdon, the museum and our neighbours, the Cambridge Conservation Initiative. We decided that the bulk of the catalogue text would mirror the exhibition interpretation, as the specific explanations behind the individual artworks were critical to the show’s outcomes.
Kingdon’s personal stories from his encounters with these animals added an incredible, human perspective. So we decided that each image in the catalogue should be accompanied by the full label text from the gallery.
For both of these interpretative aims, the “traditional” art gallery interpretation style seemed a little lacking – where a curator might write “in this piece we see how Kingdon is attempting to convey…”.
So instead, I suggested we split it into two voices – the museum introducing the natural history, and Kingdon’s voice telling the specific stories behind the art. His voice is presented in italics, in the first person, to clearly distinguish it from the institutional voice. In this sense, we were able to get across that this was a human biographical journey, reflecting an individual scientist’s attempt to make sense of their observations.
To produce these differing voices, I interviewed Kingdon about each piece and based the catalogue and label texts on recordings of his answers.
Indeed, turning Kingdon’s five-minute-long descriptive tales – one particularly potent about single-handedly skinning a dead elephant by using a Jeep to pull the skin off – into 60-word labels was arguably the hardest part of developing the show.
We hope the result is a particularly accessible series of short accounts, rather than long academic essays.
Jack Ashby is the manager of the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, and one of the exhibition’s co-curators. Evolution as Inspiration is at the museum until 15 September
Evolution as Inspiration is an exhibition of artworks by Jonathan Kingdon, one of the world’s greatest and most prolific naturalists. Kingdon was born in Tanzania in 1935 and has spent his life observing animals in the wild, chiefly in Africa.
The exhibition is divided into two sections, revealing two of Kingdon’s approaches to his art. First, displayed among the skeletons and skins of our permanent displays, are Kingdon’s detailed and immaculate anatomical drawings, made over several decades of dissecting hundreds of animal carcasses. They reflect a period in which he was attempting to understand how animals “work” under the skin.
The second half of the exhibition is based on Kingdon’s scientific analysis of how and why animals’ external appearances have come to be. Through a lifetime of detailed study of living animals in the field, he has proposed answers to questions such as why the zebra is so strikingly striped, how certain groups of birds evolved to show such a diversity of forms, and why vultures’ heads resemble rotting flesh. Kingdon has developed a wealth of vivid artistic practices that seek to explore and explain some of the hows and whys of animal evolution.
The exhibition was a collaboration between Kingdon, the museum and our neighbours, the Cambridge Conservation Initiative. We decided that the bulk of the catalogue text would mirror the exhibition interpretation, as the specific explanations behind the individual artworks were critical to the show’s outcomes.
Kingdon’s personal stories from his encounters with these animals added an incredible, human perspective. So we decided that each image in the catalogue should be accompanied by the full label text from the gallery.
For both of these interpretative aims, the “traditional” art gallery interpretation style seemed a little lacking – where a curator might write “in this piece we see how Kingdon is attempting to convey…”.
So instead, I suggested we split it into two voices – the museum introducing the natural history, and Kingdon’s voice telling the specific stories behind the art. His voice is presented in italics, in the first person, to clearly distinguish it from the institutional voice. In this sense, we were able to get across that this was a human biographical journey, reflecting an individual scientist’s attempt to make sense of their observations.
To produce these differing voices, I interviewed Kingdon about each piece and based the catalogue and label texts on recordings of his answers.
Indeed, turning Kingdon’s five-minute-long descriptive tales – one particularly potent about single-handedly skinning a dead elephant by using a Jeep to pull the skin off – into 60-word labels was arguably the hardest part of developing the show.
We hope the result is a particularly accessible series of short accounts, rather than long academic essays.
Jack Ashby is the manager of the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, and one of the exhibition’s co-curators. Evolution as Inspiration is at the museum until 15 September
By Jack Ashby, John Fanshawe and Jonathan Kingdon, University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, £10
