New Aberdeen Bestiary

About

Informed by the manuscript known as the Aberdeen Bestiary, seven international artists selected an animal, real or imagined, and explored its symbolic, social, and cultural significance. In collaboration with Peacock’s printmakers, each realised a collection of prints composing the New Aberdeen Bestiary: a three year long project that gathers new stories and new voices. The result is a multifaceted, shapeshifting collection that challenges systems of classification which impose monolithic moral and ethical values.

Bestiaries are a form of illuminated texts popular in northern Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Derived from classical written works about the natural world and early Christian works, a bestiary is a compendium of animals, real or imaginary, paired with moralising or allegorical explanations. The Aberdeen Bestiary, produced in England around 1200, arrived in the city during the 17th century when it entered the library collection at Marischal College. It is now in the collections of the University of Aberdeen.

The Aberdeen Bestiary was primarily used for education, encouraging notes, sketches, corrections, and markings. Traces of past users are evident in what is missing from the pages: excised illustrations and missing folios speak of a travelled history and multiple changes of hands. The New Aberdeen Bestiary pays attention to what is fixed onto prepared lines and to what happens in the unexplored territories along the margins.

Prompted by the amount of marginalia in the medieval text, the notes, comments and corrections, the sketches and doodles that move away from the page into the unbound wilderness of the margins, the New Aberdeen Bestiary looks at the liminal spaces between categories, where categories shift and morph into one another; the blurry areas between animal and beast.

Curated by Nuno Sacramento, Director/Curator Peacock & the worm