CREATING DEVILS
Perhaps some see it as unusual to have a love of animals while simultaneously harvesting them after death to use in an extraordinary genre of art. To call it the taxidermy renaissance would be tempting, but for Battersea based artist Tom Van Herrewege it isn’t about recreating a trend from the past, it is an intensely personal study into animals - what they mean, how they appear, how they are exhibited and whether death is necessarily their final chapter.
Tom has always been fascinated with animals, proudly nurturing exotic spiders, lizards, praying mantids, snakes and the relatively humble ferret from a young age. Now he intertwines a range of techniques to capture extraordinary concepts, the kind that make you wonder ‘What kind of a person thinks this way, and how did they arrive at this point?’
Tom explains: “I am interested in recontextualising the specimens, totally reconstructing the way we would perceive them in their natural environment, for me they are a base material like any other, from there I try to make a piece of art. The aim of my work is to create all new associations and dialogues. I conceive of a new beast from a piece of nature that in turn is effectively alien to itself when it becomes a piece of art”
Tom’s journey has been a juggling act on a number of fronts, his art being played off constantly against an empty wallet and the constraints of academic structure. Since finishing his art education though he has had a chance to pursue that which compels him most.
He showed me some of his work, and I was taken in by the story of his experiments with Jenny Hanivers, an ancient example of botched taxidermy revived by Tom whereby skate or stingray are dried in the sun and become devilish fiends. The process for creating ‘Jeune de Antwerp’ (later ‘cockneyed’ by British sailors to Jenny Hanivers) was started by the sailors sitting on the docks in Antwerp 400 years ago and carving these ‘mermaids’ out of dried cuttlefish, then preserving them with varnish and selling them on to tourists.
Part of Tom’s fascination is with the cultural associations that have developed over the history of the practice. Since the middle of the 16th century Jenny Hanivers have been responsible for tales of devils, dragons and monsters and this mythical aspect is a great driver enabling the creator to basically play god. To create animals that are almost believable in their new guise is a way for Tom to unite his love of nature and art in “a few simple and quite ugly steps”.
I asked Tom where his thought process was leading him next: “I have been stretching rubber casts of stingray over small diamond shaped canvas's and painting on imagery of Aldrovandi (a 16th century imaginative naturalist) drawings of Jenny Hanivers. This departure is effectively a chronology of Jenny Hanivers - from the original stingray, to the sun-dried ‘devils’, to the early depictions of them as exagerated and grotesque and now off on my own contemporary tangent.”
The technique of stretching the casts over canvas is another stark image that highlights the brutal simplicity and uncomfortable nature of creating art from nature. Tom also asked me to consider some compelling questions about the way in which we exhibit in, for example, museums - art or nature? - a subject Tom has written about extensively, and perhaps one for another day. In the meantime, I’m going to ponder the monstrosity I could create if I sun-dried my neighbour’s yapping chihuahua.
www.tomvanherrewege.com
