The two historical sites depicted in my paintings which no longer exist in Hull are the theme of my current work. This pair of paintings which are nearing completion relate not only to Hull but to humans longstanding and ultimately strange relationship to animals. By bringing animals into Hull for the edification of the public, the city was engaging in the highly fashionable Victorian love of exploration and discovery, not to mention categorisation. There was definitely an element of the freak show inherent in much of our human fascination for the exotic and in an attempt to contain this we often looked for elements we could relate to in our distant relatives and thereby focus on the educational aspects of it.
Anthropomorphism is recognisable in the way animals are portrayed in museums and literature and this is often responsible for the way we continue to perceive live animals. My paintings reflect on how animals are portrayed in children’s literature and even in adult encyclopaedia’s. The fake nature of the two dimensional image in painting is ideally suited to the distortion of reality, as it is in taxidermy but within many zoos we are often faced with the reality of conservation and captivity and in our desire to get close to animals we inevitably curtail their freedom. However it cannot be denied that the knowledge which we gain from this close inspection of other life forms has had huge impact on how we function and perceive ourselves.
