A pile of something resembling chocolate raisins is displayed on what looks like a cake base. There’s an artful assemblage of something the size and shape of oysters — and isn’t that chocolate torte and sticky toffee pudding over there?
“They look like something from Bake Off,” says Tracey Lee, an artist and former zookeeper, whose unique collection of animal excrement goes on public display for the first time this weekend in London.
From the distinctive square nuggets of the wombat to the minuscule hand grenades of the death’s head hawkmoth caterpillar, the produce of 120 different rear ends make up The Origin of the Feces: Poo at the Zoo.
Photo: AFP
The exhibition, which opens at Fusebox in Kingston upon Thames, is the result of more than 20 years of collecting, which began for Lee when she had to say goodbye to her favorite elephant, Geetha. One evening in 2001, she loaded the elephants on to trucks to move them from London Zoo to ZSL’s sister zoo, Whipsnade, so they could enjoy more space.
“When you work with these animals you fall in love with them. They become your family,” she says. “You’re with them from 7:30 in the morning until 6:30 at night. If they’re sick, you stay overnight with them. You’re there on Christmas Day. As the truck left and drove out into the dark, I remember feeling really bereft. It was awful. I picked up one of Geetha’s poos, held it and thought, ‘This is the last thing I have of Geetha.’”
Lee was awakened to the artistic potential of number twos in the 1990s when, as elephant keeper, she collected elephant dung for the artist Chris Ofili, drying it in the zoo’s boiler room.
Photo: AFP
When London Zoo’s rhinos, Rosie and Jos, were also moved to more spacious zoos, Lee took another memento.
“I know you shouldn’t have favorites but I just loved Jos to bits. I picked up his poo and put it next to Geetha’s in the boiler room. I know it sounds weird. And that’s how it began.”
Over the next two decades, Lee assembled her collection, drying out the stools and storing them in a friend’s barn and in her allotment shed. She would visit friends working at other zoos and leave with a car boot-load of crap.
Photo: AFP
For authentic splatter, she drops them on to a mount from the same height as the animal’s bum, and preserves them in PVA glue.
Although now odorless and hygienic, the exhibits are a feast for the senses.
Okapi (forest giraffe) manure looks like glossy chocolate raisins. Zebra dung is the same shape and size as oysters. The sizeable discharge of the Galapagos tortoise “looks like a giant tadpole or sperm with the tail on them,” thinks Lee, who two years ago moved from keeper duties to become ZSL’s “creative operative” — painting zoo spaces, leaflets and signs.
Elephant excrement is unexpectedly modest but they produce 10 or more of each chunk at a time. The strangest fecal matter belongs to Zaire, one of London Zoo’s most cherished gorillas, who died three years ago. It looks like a giant kebab.
“She was an absolutely wonderful animal, funny and intelligent and just beautiful,” Lee says. “She was very greedy and used to barge everyone out of the way to get the best bits of food — she did giant poos because she ate so much.”
The exhibition includes donations from endangered birds — collected on canvasses placed below their favorite perches — reptiles and invertebrates.
The stinkiest — before being dried and made hygienic — belonged to the African wild dog. The smallest offering was probably the grape seed-sized poos of the Partula snail, extinct in the wild but being reintroduced via captive-breeding programs.
The exhibition, which runs until Oct. 28, already has more than 1,000 schoolchildren booked to see it.
Robin Hutchinson, founder of the exhibition organizers The Community Brain and the charity Creative Youth, says: “This is a brilliant exhibition because it gives visitors permission to talk about poo — and that’s something that appeals to people of all ages. I’m especially keen to use Tracey’s amazing exhibition to connect young people to the real plight of the natural world.”
But one mammal is not represented in the collection. “The only one I haven’t done is human,” says Lee. “Please don’t ask — no way!”
While Americans face the upcoming second Donald Trump presidency with bright optimism/existential dread in Taiwan there are also varying opinions on what the impact will be here. Regardless of what one thinks of Trump personally and his first administration, US-Taiwan relations blossomed. Relative to the previous Obama administration, arms sales rocketed from US$14 billion during Obama’s eight years to US$18 billion in four years under Trump. High-profile visits by administration officials, bipartisan Congressional delegations, more and higher-level government-to-government direct contacts were all increased under Trump, setting the stage and example for the Biden administration to follow. However, Trump administration secretary
In mid-1949 George Kennan, the famed geopolitical thinker and analyst, wrote a memorandum on US policy towards Taiwan and Penghu, then known as, respectively, Formosa and the Pescadores. In it he argued that Formosa and Pescadores would be lost to the Chine communists in a few years, or even months, because of the deteriorating situation on the islands, defeating the US goal of keeping them out of Communist Chinese hands. Kennan contended that “the only reasonably sure chance of denying Formosa and the Pescadores to the Communists” would be to remove the current Chinese administration, establish a neutral administration and
A “meta” detective series in which a struggling Asian waiter becomes the unlikely hero of a police procedural-style criminal conspiracy, Interior Chinatown satirizes Hollywood’s stereotypical treatment of minorities — while also nodding to the progress the industry has belatedly made. The new show, out on Disney-owned Hulu next Tuesday, is based on the critically adored novel by US author Charles Yu (游朝凱), who is of Taiwanese descent. Yu’s 2020 bestseller delivered a humorous takedown of racism in US society through the adventures of Willis Wu, a Hollywood extra reduced to playing roles like “Background Oriental Male” but who dreams of one day
Burnt-out love-seekers are shunning dating apps in their millions, but the apps are trying to woo them back with a counter offer: If you don’t want a lover, perhaps you just need a friend? The giants of the industry — Bumble and Match, which owns Tinder — have both created apps catering to friendly meetups, joining countless smaller platforms that have already entered the friend zone. Bumble For Friends launched in July last year and by the third quarter of this year had around 730,000 monthly active users, according to figures from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Bumble has also acquired the
RSS