Wendy McMurdo’s Nature Study (Gannet) is one of an ongoing series looking at our changing relationship to animals and to the natural world. As some bird species in particular become rare or even reach the brink of extinction, it’s clear that we may never see certain species during our lifetime again. What we have left then, is a memory of these birds or animals based on fragmentary tales, recorded bird song, archival photographs or objects in the museum.
In Nature Study (Gannet) 2020, McMurdo uses composite photography to explore what rapidly evolving climate change and environmental change means for our memories and experiences of the birds and animals that inhabit the world around us.
As Errol Fuller wrote in Extinct Birds, ‘perhaps the very idea of the bird becoming extinct is something particularly startling. Their capacity for flight and their very familiarity – the fact that they live so noticeably all around us make it doubly difficult to come to terms with the idea that a species should no longer exist’.
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Wendy McMurdo’s Nature Study (Gannet) is one of an ongoing series looking at our changing relationship to animals and to the natural world. As some bird species in particular become rare or even reach the brink of extinction, it’s clear that we may never see certain species during our lifetime again. What we have left then, is a memory of these birds or animals based on fragmentary tales, recorded bird song, archival photographs or objects in the museum. In Nature Study (Gannet) McMurdo uses composite photography to explore what rapidly evolving climate change and environmental change means for our memories and experiences of the birds and animals that inhabit the world around us. As Errol Fuller wrote in Extinct Birds, ‘perhaps the very idea of the bird becoming extinct is something particularly startling. Their capacity for flight and their very familiarity – the fact that they live so noticeably all around us make it doubly difficult to come to terms with the idea that a species should no longer exist’.