The Vault

Overview

What would happen if Peter Rabbit ditched his little blue jacket, stopped playing games with the duck and went crazy? Well, he’d probably be shot, dipped in formaldehyde and stored in a New Zealand museum awaiting Neil Pardington’s photographic exploration, The Vault.

Taxidermy animals have always scared the bejesus out of me and Pardington’s wide-eyed rabbits, dopey looking deer and fine-feathered friends make you ponder their life and death. The front gallery of Grant Pirrie, like a diorama of death, confounds with elegant, large, robustly coloured photographs admirable in spite — or perhaps because — of the subject. Birds’ plumage is precisely preserved and as monkeys swing and play and the polar bear and bison advance, you feel the suspended grandeur and energy of these animals.

The adjacent room is filled with photos of dismembered mannequins (one clad fashionably in a hat and fur) which are somehow more sinister than their zoomorphic counterparts — maybe because they resemble us and have been stripped of everything, even their hair.