• Fashioning Feathers: Dead Birds, Millinery Crafts and the Plumage Trade

    "The museum needs to be turned inside out – the back rooms put on exhibition and the displays put into storage." (Mark Dion, installation artist)

    This blog (maintained by Merle Patchett) is dedicated to documenting the making of Fashioning Feathers...

    As we go behind the scenes and under the skin of the millinery preserved avian parts in store at the University of Alberta Clothing and Textiles Collections we draw attention to their excessive sensory, bodily and affective registers.

    By doing so we ask you to consider what questions these curious animal-object hybrids provoke? And by following Dion's provocation above, we also seek to create public value from stored collections that otherwise exist out of place and out of time.

Year of the Bird at Maitland Regional Gallery, New South Wales

This weekend is the last chance to see the exhibition Year of the Bird at Maitland Regional Gallery, New South Wales which Kate Foster and I submitted joint work emerging from Fashioning Feathers to. Curated by Helen Hopcroft and Caelli Jo Brooker, the exhibition  Year of the Bird features art work by Vanessa Barbray, Caelli Jo … Continue reading

Artefact as Archive

Artefact as Archive A recent vein of creative historical research has reconsidered ‘the limits and location of any set of materials determined as “archive”’ (Lorimer 2009). Within this body of work, researchers have highlighted that material encounters and material entities can be rich resources for historical recovery (Kurtz 2001; Till 2001; DeSilvey 2006, 2007b; Featherstone … Continue reading

Museological Lunch – University of Oslo

I will be speaking on to the title of “Exhibiting the Monstrous Geographies of the Plumage Trade” as part of the University of Oslo’s Museological Lunch seminar series. Time and place: Nov 28, 2012 12:15 PM – 01:30 PM, Room 425 P. A. Munch’s building Click the link for more details: http://www.uio.no/english/research/interfaculty-research-areas/kultrans/news/events/seminars/2012/museological9.html

Blue Bird of Paradise

I recently contributed a specimen to Preserved! an online collection exploring Cultures of Preservation curated by Petra Lange-Berndt. The collection emerged from the AHRC Research Network The Cultures of Preservation. From 2010 to 2012 taxidermists, artists, historians of art and science, curators and London-based institutions such as the Natural History Museum, the Hunterian Museum and … Continue reading

Images Documenting RAM Exhibition

The RAM show is well underway and is on display till January 6th 2013. There are also a number of programmed events that are being offered by the RAM to coincide with the exhibition, for details click here.  For those of you unable to visit Edmonton to see the show at the RAM Andriko Lozowy … Continue reading

Special Issue of Antennae

To coincide with the opening of the exhibition Fashioning Feathers: Dead Birds, Millinery Crafts and the Plumage Trade at the Royal Alberta Museum I guest-edited a special issue of Antennae: the Journal of Nature in Visual Culture dedicated to art, plumage and birds. Contributors include: Amanda Boetzekes, Kate Foster, Liz Gomez, Kirsteen Greer, Hayden Lorimer, … Continue reading

Installation at the RAM

Click on the link to view a set of photographs documenting the installation of Fashioning Feathers at the Royal Alberta Museum taken by Andriko Lozowy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/35723494@N04/6850812632/sizes/c/in/set-72157629214786968/

Fashioning Feathers @ the Royal Alberta Museum

I am delighted to announce Fashioning Feathers will be opening at the Royal Alberta Museum (RAM) on March 24 2012! This show will be different than the original FAB show as we are incorporating RAM collections into the show. We are making the most the the RAM’s fantastic Natural History specimens – using them to … Continue reading

Practicing Post-Natural History Display

I will be travelling to London this month to present at The Royal Geographical Society’s Annual conference in a session entitled “Exhibitionary Geographies and the Post-Museum”. In the presentation I will be discussing the conception, curation and installation of Fashioning Feathers…