Christine van Royen

The least esteemed of creatures are often the small, crawling or flying ones. Mosquito’s, lice or toads, rats or wasps were not often represented in the past as main subjects in paintings or drawings, at least by European artists. Books and studies on insects, amphibians, butterflies and sea creatures emerged eventually in the 16th and 17th century, by artists and scientists like Maria Sybilla Merian (1647-1717) and daughters. Merian did various scientific discoveries on the metamorphosis of caterpillars into butterflies, hitherto unknown. She raised caterpillars in her house and represented them with their host plants as well as the butterflies, all painted with many characteristics. What joy is must have brought her to see, discover and document a new and expanding world of creatures, some totally unknown to her.

Today the situation has changed to the extent that the newly discovered from the 17th century are slowly disappearing again. The least esteemed of creatures are starting to fail from this world. And although the small, crawling and flying creatures often live in the near surroundings of human animals, all that is noted about their absence seems to be cleaner windshields. By documenting them today, their presence or absence in our immediate surroundings will be recorded anew.

Dutch artist Hans de Vries created a Book of Dead Animals in 1978 that documented with a micro-emotive approach how animals and humans shared public space and how unfavorable this was for animals. Following his example the least esteemed of creatures were documented from 2023 onwards. Mosquitos were followed by amphibians, scorpions, grasshoppers, butterflies, wasps, bees, a rare stag beetle, sea creatures and more. They were collected for the period of one year and painted just how they were found. Sometimes with limbs missing and in strange postures, as all animals are dead when collected.

These documents of animals raise all sorts of questions about the animals themselves and their habitats, their esteem and their relations with human animals and about the way they are investigated by scientist today. Could these artistic observations improve relations between human and other animals- the ones in our houses and gardens, the toads, frogs, rats, spiders, beetles and so on- and raise attention to their presence and absence?

April 29 – July 30, 2022