1. Engaging with Animals

    Entering the aquarium we’re immediately immersed in a swarm of suspended origami jellyfish floating above our heads. Created to introduce the show “Luminescence” (how animals create and reflect light), to me the real power of these sculptures is the unexpected medium — the paper is unequivocally firm yet creased and folded, allowing the reflected light to embody the glowy and amorphous essence of jellyfish. Live jellyfish are already awesome to look at, but wow! Jellyfish!

    Walking further into the aquarium, we come across a lovely display of coral. This brought to my mind a crocheted coral reef I had seen at the Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt last year. Astonishingly intricate with delicate colours and shapes, incredibly curvy and sinuous, it was a coral reef, but in wool. Wild! Who knew wool and coral could be indistinguishable? Can you tell the difference? (Okay the fish give it away but really, is it not a mad project?) 


    Paper jellyfish, wool coral! These were amazingly evocative. And then there’s the sparrow!  I was stopped in my tracks last summer (and my children invited to play) by this immense re-imagining of a bird that usually flits and dances, angling for crumbs. This sparrow however, upends the power relationship between humans and birds, able to eat not just the crumbs but you too if you’re not fast enough. Unnerving! Interestingly, this huge, shiny bird is sculpted from polystyrene (a material usually used for disposable cutlery and foam drink cups). Touché.


    Why are these sculptures so compelling, much more so than the usual bronze (although the pasture of bronze cows in downtown Toronto is pretty great). Paper, wool and polystyrene are so unexpected, yet turn out to be perfect. The material’s tactility and history demands a re-imagining of these creatures and of the material itself, making the juxtapositions memorable. You can’t ask for more from a medium than that.

  2. Visualizing Time

    Museums are places to look and think and when the objects they offer span the lifetime of the planet, there is much to appreciate and also to think about. How does one visualize time?

    There is a helpful banner at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at the University of British Columbia, colour coding the ages, leaving the impression that dinosaurs didn’t live so long ago, just millions of years, as opposed to the really, really long time ago that single-cell organisms first appeared on earth. Now that’s a very long stretch of colour!

    The Beaty Museum is so beautiful that you can literally stand on top of dinosaur bones, helpfully protected by a glass floor, while marvelling at the reconstructed skeleton bones, spectacularly hanging from the ceiling, of a Blue Whale that washed up on a beach in PEI 30 years ago. It’s wrapping your head around the millions of years between the bones above and the bones below that takes some time.  

    (Source: beatymuseum.ubc.ca)