Making Nature: How we see animals, Wellcome Collection

The relationship between humans and animals is surely the oldest in the world. We eat them, live with them, hunt them, worship them, anthropomorphise them, watch youtube videos of their young at 4am.

For thousands of years, we have divorced man from beast, viewing ourselves as the only creatures with morality, emotions and culture. The more we learn about animals, the smaller the distance between us and them becomes. This winter, the Wellcome collection will explore what we think, feel and value about other species.



Making Nature at the Wellcome Collection brings together over 100 objects to illuminate our relationship with animals, including books, films, taxidermy, dioramas, scientific studies, photographs and genetically modified specimins.

Look out for Darwin's domesticated pigeons, Phillip Warnell’s documentary Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air about the man who lived with a tiger and the 2014 film by contemporary artists Allora and Calzadilla, The Great Silence. This film installation is a depiction of endangered parrots paired against footage of the Arecibo Observatory, the world’s largest telescope, in Puerto Rica.

And watch your step: Canadian artist Abbas Akhavan has scattered dead-looking taxidermy on the floor of the gallery. The artist hopes the “doubly dead” creatures will “trigger an encounter in the gallery, an encounter with animals, which we experience daily in their perpetual state of absence and disappearance.”