kestrel with flying lizard
golden plover with a cockroach
kingfisher with violin beetle
cuckoo with reed warbler egg
goshawk with dragonfly
goldfinch with a jezebel butterfly
jackdaw with scorpion
magpie with hawk moth
jay with cicada
starling with wasp
redwing with dobsonfly
tawny owl with owl moth
In this series of twelve photographs, taxidermy specimens are used to stage imagined nocturnal encounters between predators and their prey. The photographs gently parody the genre of hypervisual natural history documentaries we see on our televisions which tend to portray the natural world as exotic, dramatic and spectacular.
A further concern is to explore the nature of the still photograph in relation to the taxidermy specimens. Both, it would seem, attempt to give the illusion of life yet must make do with documenting the surface: bestilled, fixed, couched in a paradoxically eternal present tense.