Museum of Vancouver Gives Taxidermy A New Lease of Life

I can't say I'm a fan of taxidermy. The whole idea of killing an animal that was happy bounding about in the hills or stalking prey in the wild, gutting it, stuffing it, and displaying it as a trophy or for some other form of personal vanity seems macabre and just lacking in taste.

So I was really curious to see how the Museum of Vancouver would display a whole roomful of dead animals at its new exhibition Ravishing Beasts.

At the opening, the exhibition curator Rachel Poliquin explained that while the heyday of taxidermy has long passed, the beasts that gave up their lives all those decades ago have not necessarily gone away.

Some museums have actually disposed of their antique stuffed animals - sometimes by burning - but countless specimens, like the MOV's own collection of animals, have been closeted away in museum vaults since the Fifties.

MOV has dusted them off and lovingly cleaned them up. Age has not withered them - at least, it appears, not to the point that they can't be fixed up by the taxidermist's skilled hand.

I have to say I was impressed. The craftwork that has gone into some of the individual beasts was stunning - in particular, the huge, shining, muscular moose which dominates one side of the room. A golden maned lion on guard as you enter the exhibition could model for Narnia.

The exhibition recognises the Victorian value of taxidermy as "a technology to make nature visible" in its antique and artfully composed displays, while playing on other emotions with its fastidious recreation of the collector's paraphernalia of death.

There's usually more than a touch of melancholy to the experience of looking at these exhibits. This is particularly true when looking at a beautiful black and white collie dog, and family pet, called Lucky. And, of course, when you stumble across the two extinct exhibits the passenger pigeon, and a Huia bird from New Zealand.

Given that so many of these beasts were resurrected from chambers deep in the bowels of some museum or other, the exhibition seems respectful to the former beasts. There was a young woman who was swanning around with what looked like one of the exhibits on her head (a provocateur, perhaps?). The amateur, taxidermy disaster that was bought for a song on Ebay is a bit of a cheap joke. But this was as in good taste as possible. More like an art show.

Poliquin suggested in her introductory speech "the eyes may be glass, but the animal looks back." If so, what you see is society's changing relationship with the animal world, a sense of 'What an amazing creature! Pity it's dead.' That strange ambivalent feeling you get while gazing at these animals is probably a good thing.

Ravishing Beasts exhibition is at the Museum of Vancouver til 28 Feb, 2010.