Art and science are two very different disciplines, but both are interrogative, asking deep, and often uncomfortable, questions about what things mean.
Just as scientists try to explain the world around us, Deb Mostert’s art is underpinned by observation and enquiry. Her art is cerebral and accessible at the same time. There’s paradox and irony in her thought-provoking artworks but it’s also (to use Deb’s own words) “fun and friendly”.
Her exhibition, Nature and Culture – animal as object, will be exhibited at Caloundra Regional Gallery between December 12 and February 2. It’s a collection of more than 50 works, from oil paintings to watercolours, sketchbooks, dioramas and installations.
And, it asks the viewer why human beings are obsessed with creating facsimiles of animals when the originals are at risk of extinction?
Deb maintains that artists and scientists are not so dissimilar, each struggles to convince the world there’s worth in all living creatures.
“There’s worth in this practice of deep looking and understanding, always asking questions about: ‘Why? Oh, and what does that mean? And what can that mean for us? And how can we help?’ All these questions that the scientists ask, I find I’m echoing myself as an artist,” she says.
The idea for the exhibition germinated from Deb’s visits to the Queensland Museum over the past seven years where she drew and documented what she saw in the mammal and bird collections.
She first started visiting the museum because she wanted to study migratory shorebirds up close, whereas in nature, on the mudflats, they were distant and more difficult to sketch.
The 57-year-old mid-career artist was undertaking a project at the time called Australien Future, which was about her family’s migration story from the Netherlands to Australia in the 1950s, and she wanted to overlay imagery of migratory shorebirds.
During this research, Deb had behind-the-scenes access to the museum where she was able to observe and sketch preparators and volunteer taxidermists going about their business. “It just ignited all my love of natural history and my love of objects and collections with my practice in still life [drawing and paintings],” she says.
Deb describes her art practice as “pretty broad” but underpinned by an interest and love of observational drawing.
She filled many sketchbooks from her museum visits, which is the place where she “works things out” creatively and intellectually. According to Deb, the arts and science have intersected for aeons.
“All the early explorers and early scientists and naturalists used the method of recording what they were seeing in sketchbooks, so I sort of feel like I’m in a continuum.”
As a child, Deb discovered the joys of the natural world through Gerald Durrell’s books (author of My Family and Other Animals, among other books) and made careful copies of the Ralph Thomson illustrations in his books.
In the early 2000s, Deb went back to uni to study a fine arts degree. That’s when she really started focusing on objects and also investigating her family roots in the Netherlands.
“There’s a great long history, a tradition of still life painting within the Dutch artists, so I sort of took that up, and I ran with it,” Deb explains.
“I’ve been investigating objects for a long time, but most of my work is about paradox and parable. How can something be the same but different simultaneously?”
Ideas about the objectification of creatures started with a study of the grey nurse shark. Deb created an ironic evolutionary chart of the species, which actually charted the de-evolution of those sharks into popular culture and souvenirs. It started with the valuable holotype skin of the grey nurse shark, continuing to kitsch soap holders and shark suit-wearing Lego figurines.
“How do we feel about the various images of sharks within our popular culture?” Deb asks.
“From shiver to shudder, can it help our understanding and appreciation for the shark as an integral and important species?”
Deb then continued to chart the de-evolution of other endangered species: the koala, the bridled nailtail wallaby, the powerful owl, giant barred frog, loggerhead turtle and humpback whale.
“They all start out very specific and unique and then devolve into generic caricatures or wildly inventive pop subspecies.”
Deb says this collection for the exhibition is essentially “fun and friendly”.
“They’re very kind of pop-like, somewhat realistic paintings of stuffed toys, marine animals and the like,” she says.
“And they’re very appealing. But there’s a hook in the tail. You know, there’s a barb at the back that you don’t have to engage with, but I hope people would.”
In creating the art for Animal as Object, Deb says she knew she wanted to have something that vaguely harked back to the ‘wunderkammer’ idea – that Victorian cabinet of curiosities that was a precursor to modern museums.
For Deb, the strangeness of seeing animals become objects in the museum taxidermy became a paradox she was also interested in exploring. Like Rachel Poliquin asks, “What does it mean to be dead but not gone?” (The Breathless Zoo, 2012).
“And what does taxidermy mean now we’re at a place where we’re uncomfortable with the colonial mindset that collected it?” she asks.
“Today, whether you visit a theme park or a zoo, and even the Queensland Museum, you exit via the gift shop.
“People want something to take away. Kids want some cuddly version of a shark or a whale or whatever, and I also wondered about the use of animals in popular culture. What does it mean to be objectified and sold as mass-produced plastic?
“How do our children learn about the natural world and its creatures if only on a screen or as a souvenir toy? What is the place of the animal object in nature as taxidermy and in culture as the souvenir?
“Can we make something redemptive out of our habits of collecting and consuming that works towards flourishing for all animals, ourselves included?
“I don’t necessarily have any answers, but the questions that I’m asking myself are what I’m putting up in the exhibition to share with the community.”
gallery.sunshinecoast.qld.gov.au