thoughts after visiting the 'Making Nature: how we see animals' exhibition @ the Wellcome Collection
Thinking about the experimentations I’ve done in the past weeks, I feel that I’ve definitely expressed ‘pain’ in what I’ve painted… but perhaps not as clearly as to represent my ‘childhood trauma’. I’ve always faced difficulty in clearly conveying what it is I want to get through to the viewer. How would I represent this? Do I display clearly objects from the past connected to the trauma? Do I show my emotions through text? Could I go abstract and just paint whatever I feel when thinking about the Happy-sad Childhood Days?
After that visit to the Wellcome Collection, I started to think more about the relationship between man and animal. It’s certainly interesting how humans ‘intentionally alter other organisms,’ as written in the show. Does this mean we are superior to animals? That’s certainly true in my religion (Buddhism). Only when you are human do you get the chance to meditate and ascend to Paradise/heaven. Animals have to wait for their next life, and if they’re lucky they can go up a level to live as a human then perhaps succeed in ending this endless cycle of life on earth. This superiority is almost ironic, since there might be more similar things between animals and humans than the dissimilar. At certain moments in our lives, we are reduced to our animalistic instincts and raw emotions. We stop communicating verbally and act on our own. The humane becomes inhumane. We get trapped in the greatest fears, we drop our humanness and commit great crimes, even murder. Animals murder each other all the time. What is the difference? We become relentless and indestructible. Until we are slowly and inevitably destroyed by traumas and death.
Why do we experience trauma? is this all a game of fate? Do only the people who can take it experience trauma? certainly not. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many broken people in the world, trapped in mental hell. But the people who’ve never experienced any trauma… have they lived such a good, hard life in their previous life that they’ve been granted a trauma-free life now? Can trauma be passed on? Is there such thing as second-hand trauma? So many questions are floating around my head, waiting to be answered. The thing about trauma specifically occurring in childhood is that, it happened in a time when your idea of the world, your conscience, your sense of self has not developed yet. For the countless children who were abused, how damaging that impact is on your whole well-being! your mind must be in ruins. Unfortunately for some, they become the abusers themselves. They can no longer recognise what’s right and what’s wrong. In a lot of cases, they can no longer feel empathy for others. Which means they are the ones who have the ability to commit terrible, inhumane, animalistic crimes. In researching Reactive Attachment Disorder, I’ve grown fascinated and scared that such a bond between children and parents is so vital in a child’s development. I count myself lucky to not have gone through such drastic childhood traumas such as being abused. To those who have been, I hope they heal one day, even if the journey to recovery takes more than one cycle of life.
In the ‘Making Nature: how we see animals’ exhibition, several taxidermy animals have been placed in the corners of the show rooms. They caused shock, fear, and fascination to the visitors, including me. How could something so full of death be so full of life? It’s a twisted concept. Even though you try to preserve the animals in its most lively position, aren’t you just prolonging its death? Isn’t it better to let go? Would the animals appreciate its corpse being preserved forever? Perhaps. Although, the animals placed in the corners aren’t in a very lively position at all. They were curled up, limp limbs and all, but their eyes were wide open, wide open to the viewer towering above. The glassy eyes reflected my own, I could see into its empty shell. I can’t take my eyes off the ‘corpse’. Can’t take my mind off the death. The pain the animal have suffered in its life. Do we feed off each others’ pain? Do we do this to suppress our own pain? Pain is inevitable when you’re human, its a heavy burden on the heart. After a traumatic experience, an empty shell is left. Such lack of emotion yet so full of feeling..you want to express it but you are just a shell trapped in time, after all. That’s how I view taxidermy. That is why I am so fearful of viewing taxidermy, yet so fascinated by it at the same time.
Peter Spicer: Fox Cubs, 1875