Collected and Possessed

Solo exhibition at the Horniman Museum, 28th November 2015 - 24th January 2016.

Most of the objects and specimens in the Horniman Museum collection, like those in many of the great Museum collections, are not on display to the public. They are kept in storage, boxed and wrapped, contained securely in buildings sited away from the Museum itself. The painter Mark Fairnington has looked into these hidden spaces in different Museums and made paintings of things he has found there. This was an exhibition of some of those paintings shown alongside the specimens, objects and images from the collections that inspired them. The collections include including the Horniman, the Natural History Museum and the Wellcome Collection.

Museum storage depots are strange, intriguing and unusual places full of truly peculiar, disturbing, breath taking and genuinely surreal images. Taxidermy specimens are kept on shelves wrapped in transparent plastic sheets, a bird skeleton stands perched in its own wooden box, a small pet dog lies in a nest of tissue paper inside a cardboard box. At the Wellcome wax heads sit next to anatomical models, real skulls and medieval sculptures. There are rooms of prosthetic limbs and shelves with plaster death masks of executed criminals. Juxtapositions occur that are disturbing, unexpected and profoundly moving.

The exhibition included paintings made by the artist over the last 15 years including large-scale mounted insects the size of humans, birds of paradise specimens, panoramic views of specimens in the Natural History Museum stores, and paintings of life-sized prize winning bulls. A series of miniatures depict, amongst other things, a skull with false teeth, a wax head on a cushion, an anatomical head wrapped in bandage and the carved wooden head of a prophet. The paintings all represent the objects in the different collections, as they are in situ, contained but not curated. The specimens and objects from the collections will be presented alongside the artworks, as things to be seen in their own right.

The exhibition attracted 18,000 visitors.

• http://www.horniman.ac.uk/visit/exhibiti...
• http://www.horniman.ac.uk/get_involved/b...
• http://www.artfund.org/get-involved/art-...
• http://wsimag.com/art/18251-collected-an...
• http://www.culture24.org.uk/art542152-cu...
• https://www.instagram.com/p/BA2ReeWoiXS/