Almost at the last minute, I added a coat and hat for a curator to the exhibition. The coat had been hanging around waiting for its role. I didn’t see how it was going to accrue enough meaning to be included but it was itself part of my aunt Julia’s collection of clothes so it had meaning for me. Then over last weekend I made the hat from almost everything on the ‘nature table’ under our stairs, acrylic paint and adrenalin.
It’s over the top, dripping with bird and wasp nests found by my daughter, moths bred by Dad, a wild boar’s jaw found on holiday with Mum, beetles and a butterfly. Now shown with the coat, which is undone to reveal part of a double injection specimen and a printed interior it means something.
It reminds of a drawing or print of a flayed arm in a book I have: ‘The Quick and the Dead – Artists and Anatomy’. It’s beautiful. (Super book if you are interested in drawing and science btw.)
