• Tags:

Duck number 2
Christian Barnes

Paul Nuttall’s Wedding

Sitting at the back of a church at Paul Nuttall’s wedding in Clitheroe over ten years ago (Paul is a long standing family friend and piano dealer who hails from Blackburn) I found myself looking at the back of an unknown woman’s head. Her bleached hair was partly concealed by a bright pink feathered hat.

During the service I allowed my attention to wander and I found myself wondering what kind of bird would have to be plucked to make a hat like that.

Bird thoughts

I returned home and, as an exercise, I tried to visualise a bird whose feathers could be used for such a purpose. I made a number of drawings experimenting with different configurations of plumage, beaks, feet and cockscombs (which until this time I had only really thought of as a garnish) and drew on representations of mythological birds such as the Griffin and Phoenix.

The outcome of my thinking forced me to accept that I could invent nothing more elaborate than that which already exists. At every step my imagination was outsmarted. How could anybody imagine anything more ornate than a Lyrebird’s tail feathers and faultless reproduction of artificial sound, or the astonishing plumage of a peacock?

There is a crassness and irrelevance to human invention and manipulation of animals that is revealed by such an investigation and I suppose that that – a feeling of revulsion - is what drew me to the hat in the first place.

I began to look more closely at birds and take an interest in exotic (or at least displaced) species around me - there are many such examples but in my local experience those which stand out are a selection of macaws kept by a wealthy man in Kirkby Stephen which he allows to fly freely. They are often startled by vehicles between Kirkby and Winton and they look both magnificent and desperate as they struggle to remain airborne under the weight of their plumage.

A nearby farm ‘Trainriggs’ keeps ostriches in a field by the road near the Shap summit. I drive past them almost daily and am now often surprised that my occasional passengers find this extraordinary.

I have realised that even common or garden birds when looked at closely seem like exotic works of fantasy and so I came to feel that the imaginary bird from which this hat might have been made could have been quite ordinary.

The ‘Art’ of the Taxidermist

At the same time my former colleague Carol Davis, the curator of Kendal Natural History Museum had been working with a conservation taxidermist Wendy Walker to make a reconstruction of a pre-historic bird using salvaged body parts. This was around the time of the notorious Archeoraptor fraud (I was pondering a footnote about this but I’m just going to assume that you know what I’m talking about instead)

Carol and Wendy’s bird had ‘hands’ in the middle of its wings and the assertive air of a dinosaur, albeit a rather small one. It looks a bit pissed off.

The mounts at Carol’s museum were originally displayed not as they are today in the form of a ‘World Wild Life Gallery’ (complete with execrable dioramas of habitats and exhortations to be sensitive to the environment). Rather they constituted a gory trophy house (donated by Colonel Harrison in 1938) with one wall entitled Asia, another Africa and so on. Each could have been subtitled ’and the animals I shot there’. The mounts were displayed on shields often alongside the recovered bullets used to shoot the animals and the labelling could often appear pejorative in tone. One rather meek looking animal was referred to as ‘this little devil’.

I have always been interested in the way that the mounts had been posed to display the attitudes and characteristics human beings associate with animals.

As an illustration of type a tableau might show ‘vanquishing hunters’ - a part often played by eagles - devouring a small, venal and ‘vanquished prey’ - a part often played by rodents.

The idea of animals taking on human attributes and character and thereby personifying associative values has always been particularly interesting to me.

It is this kind of thinking that can be found in the great specimen displays of natural history exhibits however ‘scientific’ they can appear. Children intuitively understand how bogus such scientific narratives are – Alice Liddle is reputed to have asked Charles Dodgson what the point of giving animals names was if they didn’t answer to them while on a tour of the Science Museum in Oxford where the mounts are displayed in serried ranks under the watchful gaze of a bust of Linnaeus.

The use of character in relation to the personification of animals is extended in children’s literature where fictional animal characters exchange their identities with human beings and in the process somehow become more approachable.

Where people are difficult to understand, animals are simple. This is the foundation of the fiction of Kenneth Graham’s Wind in the Willows or Beatrix Potter’s charming and beautifully drawn books for children where a population animals form a cast of characters: Owls and Badgers (bad tempered and officious – they probably work for local government in real life); Squirrels, Rabbits (impish and playful); Ducks (innocent and motherly) and Foxes and Toads (not to be confused with Frogs) loutish rogues or deceitful villains!

Inspired by Potter (Jemima Puddleduck) I plumped for adapting an Aylesbury duck. I have always liked ducks feeling that they are both versatile (swim, waddle, fly, lay eggs, quack) and that they are pleasant to look at. They are also reassuringly ordinary.

Somewhere in this extended daydream I thought of the idea of collaborating with a taxidermist to create the bird that could be plucked to make the hat. I first asked Wendy and she said yes but nothing ever came of it.

I later recruited from the Westmorland County Show the services of Staveley based taxidermist Simon Wilson and arranged to visit him and explain my idea. Although the idea was simple, the initial conversation was awkward with several gaps in understanding between us.

However, when I went to his workshop I discovered that his imagination and his knowledge of exotic mounts far exceeded my own. His extraordinary craft skills had recently seen him complete a unicorn for a wealthy client in New York and he had restored the famous half fox half badger that sits over the bar in the Twa Dogs Inn in Keswick.

We discussed the project and the attitudes and poses that could be ascribed to the duck. I left it with Simon that he would obtain an undamaged duck and arrange for it to be dyed and we would meet again.

His workshop was full of little armatures, modelling materials and - his preference - tightly bound straw models of animals. He explained that when an animal’s carcass arrived for stuffing he would carefully skin it exposing the connective tissue and major organs. He would then keep this material and attempt to replicate its proportions volume for volume with a straw copy (or former) of the innards over which he would later stretch the preserved hide.

We browsed catalogues of beaks and eyes and discussed an outline approach.

I remember that while we were talking an anonymous donor delivered some road kill and made a hasty getaway.

Duck number one.

Duck number one actually came from Aylesbury. He was killed specially for the purpose in order to avoid damage. His carcass was sent to Simon who prepared the former over which the coloured feathers would later be stretched.

Having made the form, the hide of feathers was sent to be coloured in a dye works that produced feather boas. The feathers came back to Simon exactly the bright artificial pink of the hat but he was so offended by this ‘abomination’ that he discarded them and rang me to explain his reasons for doing so.

He felt that the dignity of the animal had not been respected.

I talked to him for some time about this and I agreed with him that we would have another go, but that rather than using an ‘artificial’ colour we would attempt to use a subtle one which suggested that the animal might actually have existed - something which to the casual viewer would be perceptible but not offensive. It was this conversation that turned a punkish, confrontational and basically rhetorical idea into something more sophisticated and far less rational.

We settled on a very white pink somewhere below the intensity of a flamingo.

Duck number two.

The second duck arrived and this time I made sure that I was there when the packets were opened. The pelt was just touched with a pink blush and had all the freshness of a flower petal. It was extraordinarily beautiful - much more beautiful than the hat. It also looked as if it could have existed and was not a deliberate artifice.

We set up the mount and the pose.

He was a huge Aylesbury duck almost the size of a goose. The mount was sculpted in straw on an aluminium armature. I directed that he was to be set up to look directly at eye level, eyeball to eyeball with the viewer as if to say: “What are you looking at?“

After the pose was completed I chose blue eyes for him from the eye catalogue. They went perfectly with the pink. For a number of years the duck sat in my office and, indeed, at the end of our bed. For the last few years since our move and to protect him from the enthusiastic examination of our children he has resided under a bin liner in the barn along with a bequest of books and assorted stored artworks.

« back to the gallery

---