Large-scale sound, light and projection event
Shown at the Great North Museum as part of North of the Tyne, Under the Stars event in March 2022
Produced by Pinwheel and DAT Events and commissioned by the North of Tyne Combined Authority Longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2024
Using a fusion of large-scale projection, light and sound, Anthro Zoo takes a nocturnal journey deep into the zoology stores of the Great North Museum – home to a vast and eclectic collection of taxidermy specimens. Here resides an order of animal skins skillfully shaped by the taxidermist to capture the memory and shape of former lives. Rabbit and wolf exist peacefully together with the now extinct Great Auk and Huia birds.
Using 3D laser scanning technology, lighting and film, a selection of these creatures have been digitally captured and transformed into luminous bodies of light, ready to re-inhabit the city of Newcastle. Scans of the museum and the city create an ethereal context for this imaginary world, whilst the façade of the Great North Museum provides a dramatic backdrop for experiencing Anthro Zoo.
With thanks to the following organisations and people for undertaking the original 3D laser scans: OR3D and Seven Three Productions: Andy Coates, Paul Green and May McConnell.
Background to the making of Anthro Zoo
The impetus behind the making of Anthro Zoo was generated by our research and exploration of the taxidermy at the Great North Museum’s Biology Store and our conversations with their Keeper of Biology, Dan Gordon, whose detailed knowledge of the specimens and their background stories brought the collection to life.
At its most basic level taxidermy functions as a document to a past life, but it also seems to be entwined with something else – a human longing for order, narrative, allegory, spectacle and beauty.
Some of the specimens we selected to laser scan and film were chosen because of their rarity, some for their ordinariness. The brown rat and the great auk with her egg were such examples; the latter a species that is now extinct and whose demise was partly due to rats eating the auks’ eggs. Other specimens we chose because of their connection to the area or because they had a resonance with the city.
The North East is steeped in legends of shape-shifting animals and creatures such as the gyest, boggle, the Hedley Kow and Lambton Worm with many of these emerging as apparitions during the hours of darkness. Around the city references to animals can be found in the street names such as Dog Leap Stairs or in the architectural detail of the Vampire Rabbit of Newcastle, a mysterious grotesque that is perched above an ornate rear door of the historic Cathedral Buildings.
Scans of these city spaces, the Quayside and the Great North Museum provided the context for the scanned taxidermy forms to find a new scale and expression.
Left to right: the extinct great auk; a miner’s canary bird in cage and the now extinct slender-billed curlew and huia birds.
Filming inside the Great North Museum taxidermy store
