The matter and meaning of museum taxidermy

Abstract

Focusing on taxidermy in contemporary museums and art galleries, my paper explores relationships between the materiality of taxidermy and its multiple readings or narratives. I present four such narratives – descriptive, biographical, cautionary, and experiential – and examine the ways these overlapping and competing readings manipulate and transform taxidermied mounts and, conversely, how mounted creatures always embody an excess that resists full disclosure.