If you stand looking at whale bones in a museum, there’s always a story. How did they get here? What was their life like? How did they go from being huge living, breathing, feeling animals to bones labelled on a shelf? Did their family or pod grieve, like we do?
Most of what we know about whales starts with industrial whaling. The records kept and specimens collected during the era of industrial whaling have a dark history. But, long after death, they provide crucial information to scientists and researchers around the world.
In 2023 I began working with the Natural History Museum London’s Principal Curator of Mammals, Richard Sabin, as a visiting artist/researcher. I’ve been focused on telling the stories of whales and dolphins for a few years, and this was a dream come true. But it was also less than a year after a tragic loss in my family, and I was still making sense of it all.
Together with Richard’s incredible knowledge, I studied bones that have been in museum records since records began. I quickly focused my attention on how whale oil is still present on these bones, even after hundreds of years.
From the shelves, cupboards and drawers of the Natural History Museum’s Cetacea Research Collection, to coming to terms with loss, Here/after is a process: a scientific process, and a healing process.
