Taxidermy is an organised craft which synthesises preserved animal skins with man-made materials to recreate a resemblance of living animals. As products of a cultural practice, displayed and interpreted in museums for the public, taxidermied animals are material manifestations of contingent value judgements. Despite the now widely held view in museum studies that the meanings of museum objects are constructed through their interpretation and reception, and therefore can have a multiplicity of meanings, many museums today continue to present and interpret taxidermied animals as objective species representatives. Although scientific themes continue to be privileged by many museums which maintain natural science as a discrete discipline, various social, ethical and political themes relating to the environment and to relationships between people have become more pronounced in recently redeveloped museums. Using Leeds City Museum, the Great North Museum: Hancock, and Museums Sheffield: Weston Park as case studies, this thesis investigates these changes to trace wider cultural shifts in politics, ethics, education and science. By analysing the frameworks within which museums and their staff operate, this investigation is concerned with the relationship between discourse and social practice in the form of museum exhibitions as a means of creating knowledge. It highlights how the public understanding of the natural world is more mutable than some of the enduring traditions of science may suggest, and how the discourses on science, and the objects through which they are articulated, are subject to cultural shifts which put their meanings in flux. This study is both part of, and a response to, an expanding field in museum studies and material culture studies which re-frames taxidermy objects as culturally contingent and therefore reflective of the subject positions of their makers, and the broader contexts of their making. In collating and investigating a diverse collection of archival material, this study recovers some of taxidermy’s histories, and contributes to the historical discourse on the display and interpretation of museum collections.

The past fifteen years have seen an unexpected resurgence of taxidermy in popular culture — from hip restaurants and bars to interior design and movies. However this phenomenon has been counterposed by the simultaneous dismantling of dioramas in natural history museums in light of a postcolonial critical reappraisal of the practice, predominantly contextualizing taxidermy as the negative by-product of Victorian-era colonization. It is clear that utopian positivistic visions of that time and the imperialist economies of power, subjugation, and wealth indeed contributed to the emergence of taxidermy. However, between this negative positioning of its historical past and the renewed ‘hype’ it has found in popular culture, lies the emergence of taxidermy in the contemporary exhibition space. This thesis focuses on the latter phenomenon, questioning the problematic and uncomfortable encounters with manipulated animal bodies that seemingly return, along with our shared histories, to haunt us. Taking Steve Baker’s landmark theorization of the postmodern animal as a starting point, and more specifically concentrating on the ‘botched taxidermy’ strand of his thought, this thesis focuses on a selection of works by contemporary artists Gerard Richter, Roni Horn, Jordan Baseman, and Steve Bishop. Situated across the disciplines of animal studies, Foucault studies, and visual cultures, this inquiry focuses on how the differential specificities of mediums such as photography, painting, and sculpture in some instances provide a productive opportunity to rethink human/animal relations through art. To support this analysis, and departing from the frame offered by Baker, this thesis also provides a new critique of Foucault’s fragmentary work on painting and photography. It thus expands his unfinished project to adapt genealogical and biopolitical frameworks to visual analysis. More broadly, this thesis grounds current posthumanist debates in the definitive movements of contemporary art.