Wellcome Collection sees in New Year with ‘Making Nature’ exhibition

The question of how humans relate to other animals has captivated philosophers, anthropologists, scientists, ethicists and artists for centuries. ‘Making Nature’ at London’s Wellcome Collection is running until 21st May and brings together over 100 objects from literature, film, taxidermy and photography to examine what we think, feel and value about other species and the consequences this has for the world around us. It will include works by contemporary artists including Allora and Calzadilla and Phillip Warnell, and asks how and why we look at animals and what we see when we do.

From the formalisation of natural history as a science, through the establishment of museums and zoos, to lavish contemporary wildlife documentaries, ‘Making Nature’ will reveal the hierarchies in our view of the natural world, and will consider how these influence our actions, or inactions, towards the planet. The exhibition is organised around four themes: ‘Ordering’, ‘Displaying’, ‘Observing’ and ‘Making’.

‘Making Nature’ will question the approach of ‘learning through looking’, including artists such as herman de vries, a trained botanist interested in the challenge of objectivity. The importance of listening is also examined by artists Allora and Calzadilla in The Great Silence 2014. This film installation is a depiction of endangered parrots paired against footage of the Arecibo Observatory, the world’s largest telescope, in Puerto Rica.

The exhibition will also chart changing fashions of museum displays alongside society’s changing attitudes to nature, from overstuffed cabinets in Victorian institutions to elaborately staged dioramas from natural history museums in the 20th century.

The search for an authentic encounter with nature will be further examined through our ever more ambitious attempts to get closer to animals, in zoos, national parks and on screen, while simultaneously hoping to preserve their wildness. The New Architecture and The London Zoo 1936, a film by László Moholy-Nagy, and Casson Condor’s architectural photographs from the 1970s will provide examples of how the designs of zoo enclosures are used to frame animals. The phenomena of the ‘zoo-pet’, or mascot, is explored through cases like Jumbo the elephant, adored by Victorian audiences and subject of a public outcry when he was sold to P.T. Barnum’s Circus in 1882. Souvenirs and toys will show how zoo animals have frequently been anthropomorphised in popular culture.

Depictions of animals on film include Woodpeckers 1954, the first documentary to use new camera technologies to film a family of woodpeckers from within their nest. When broadcast on the BBC, it was second in popularity only to the Queen’s coronation that year, and set the precedent for natural history documentaries that remain popular today.

Phillip Warnell’s film installation Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air 2016 will explore the true story of Antoine Yates, who lived in a high-rise New York apartment with a tiger called Ming and a large alligator. Combining documentary with recreated scenes, Warnell offers new insights on the human/animal relationship and the question of representation.

The final section of the exhibition will be curated in collaboration with the Center for PostNatural History, Pittsburgh, USA, the only organisation to solely collect organisms that have been intentionally altered by humans. Specimens, paintings, literature and scientific models, many on loan from the Center’s museum, will chart a relationship to animals that is bound up with the history, and future, of human civilisation. This includes the breeding of domesticated pigeons by Charles Darwin that helped to inform his theories of natural selection and the genetic modification of mosquitos in the fight against disease spread.

‘Making Nature’ is the first part of a year-long exploration of our relationship with the natural world in the past, present and future. The exhibition is curated by Honor Beddard and the exhibition design is by AOC. Wellcome Collection will publish Animal Vegetable Mineral, a book by Tim Dee and Anna Faherty, to accompany the exhibition.

Wellcome Collection
Wellcome Collection is the free visitor destination for the incurably curious. Located at 183 Euston Road, London, it explores the connections between medicine, life and art in the past, present and future. The newly expanded venue offers visitors contemporary and historic exhibitions and collections, lively public events, the world-renowned Wellcome Library, a café, a shop, a restaurant and conference facilities as well as publications, tours, a book prize, international and digital projects.

Wellcome Collection is part of Wellcome, a global charitable foundation that exists to improve health for everyone by helping great ideas to thrive. Both politically and financially independent, it supports scientists and researchers, takes on big problems, fuels imaginations and sparks debate.

Photo credit: Phillip Warnell, Ming of Harlem, 2016 © the artist