Joel Conison
Georgia
Artist Statement Submitted 2014
This group of photographs captures the natural beauty of birds in an unnatural environment.A chance encounter with one of the curators of the Fernbank Natural History Museum provided me with access to a number of taxidermy specimens. Most notably the beautiful and somewhat mysterious remains of preserved birds.
As much as I was excited about the possibility to incorporate these animals into my work I was a bit intimidated as well. On one hand the taxidermic creatures allowed me to work with, to approach, to handle them in a way that living creatures would not have tolerated. On the other, the process of taxidermy, by definition, had removed the very essence of their fleeting existence. Without a doubt they had become objects and yet there remained something elusive. I realized that as a photographer I couldn’t treat them as I would have treated wild birds in nature. Indeed I didn’t want to treat them as birds at all but rather in terms of a statement on the human interaction with n
