Tom Van Herrewege

Profile/CV

My work is inspired by the incredible diversity of an animals physical form. I am interested in man’s and my own individual interpretation of this throughout history and the ways in which the other is perceived through different aspects of culture. It is the ways that animals are removed from their environments and understood as both objects and living beings that informs my drawings and sculptures. I try to re examine these subjects using the animal form as a base material and as a starting image that can then be transformed into a different physical form and placed in a reconsidered locale. These reworked images act quite like my own solutions to the complexity of the animal forms. Often with vague hints at man made objects with specific functions to which we are already familiar and therefore acting like a reverse approach to how nature informs design. My research is largely informed by the history of animal representation within art and natural history. I look at the ways animals are presented through the media and their display in collections and the various languages we invent and adopt to understand them. I am drawn to the abstraction of information that occurs naturally when conveying mans discoveries from natural history using artistic means and visual translations. My recent drawings and sculptures have been exploring the design and ideas shared in curiosities made from taxidermy and preserved animals. I am interested in how these curios’s attempt to make sense of an animals form as decorative features through how they are manipulated and placed with other materials. Within my drawings selected features from animal forms are juxtaposed amongst man made materials in order to highlight the beauty of the animal through similar concerns to that of these early curiosity craftsmen. The construction of curios and their use of the animal as the key material element in their formulation that makes me reconsider what can be defined as art or artefact.