Those of us in the Museum Studies program here at the University of Aberdeen have spent the past few months working towards something very special.
Those of us in the Museum Studies program here at the University of Aberdeen have spent the past few months working towards something very special. We were tasked with creating our own exhibition and given full control over the topic and contents. The idea of doing something related to the pandemic was floated; however, everyone agreed that we’ve all been exposed to enough distressing information lately. We thought to ourselves, what if, instead, we were to focus on something that helped us get through the pandemic?
For many of us, the animals in our lives provided comfort and service in a time of immense hardship. The fact is that animals have been intertwined in human lives for thousands of years; so, we decided to showcase the many different aspects of this relationship. We are happy to announce that our exhibition titled, Eat, Prey, Love: Humans and Other Animals will launch online on August 15, 2022.
This project has required us to work together through every stage, including creating a title, selecting objects, writing labels, designing a webpage, and marketing the exhibition. We’ve come together every week to discuss every minute detail of our plan and to share what each of the teams have been working on. We are extremely excited, and more importantly, very proud to share the culmination of our studies with all of you.
For most of us on the course, this is our first time getting to put together an exhibition of our very own. It’s been educational, certainly, but also a very creatively fulfilling experience.
Kaleigh Weickert, from the Design & Marketing team, expresses her thoughts on the project: "This is something that we’ve not only worked very hard on, but that we think is very thought provoking and meaningful. We wanted to create an exhibition that would offer a new perspective on an aspect of life that everybody is familiar with. We all know animals, most of us love animals, but I don’t necessarily think everybody puts much thought into what role we really play in each other's lives."
The purpose of the exhibition is to explore the complex relationship between people and animals using a variety of compelling artefacts from the University of Aberdeen’s collections. Visitors can look forward to seeing and learning about many fascinating objects: including a ‘man trap’ from Aberdeenshire with a fearsome original purpose, the ‘Paradise Parrot’ that became extinct in the early 20th century, a mummified cat from ancient Egypt, and more.
Eat, Prey, Love: Humans and Other Animals gives visitors an opportunity to contemplate their own thoughts and assumptions about animal domestication. We attempt to explore this concept in a holistic manner: touching on the benefits, the drawbacks, and the overall effects of domestication on the lives of human and non-human animals.
We look at objects related to working animals, companion animals, and food source animals. Our goal is to explore the deeper meanings of domestication and question whether it ought to be viewed as a mutually beneficial relationship or as something that is profitable for humans exclusively. See you there!