Events

Saturday 29 March - Sunday 11 May
Launch event Saturday 29 March from 2pm, FREE artist's talk 4pm, no need to book, just turn up.

During 2007 Lyndall Phelps undertook an artist in residency at the Natural History Museum, London, allowing her to work closely with Zoology and Entomology staff, and access the Museum’s extensive specimen collections.

Coded Ornithology has evolved from the artist’s fascination with bird collections and the unique coding system of coloured and numbered dots, known as spot numbers used by the Museum’s Bird Group. This allows quick identification of the different categories of specimens; species, subspecies, geographical locations, sex, etc.

There are 300 individual spots, six colours, with each colour having spots numbered 1 to 50. With no generic system for their use, what at first seems an ordered and rigid procedure, is implemented by individual curators in a personalized manner.

The use of colour, especially the monochrome, is a recurring element in her work, along with repetitive, labour intensive production processes. The photographs and works on paper which feature in the exhibition are as much a celebration of colour as they are a study of museology practice.

The Natural History Museum residency resulted from Lyndall’s participation in Escalator Visual Arts, an Arts Council England, East initiative, to support the region’s most promising artists.