Terraqueous Painting

The story goes that in 1825 a bull sperm whale was washed up dead on Tunstall beach, near Burton Constable Hall, Yorkshire. It automatically became the property of the local Squire Sir Thomas Ashton Clifford Constable. A Yorkshire physician Alderson, examined the carcass. Afterwards it was buried, then the bones exhumed. In 1836 it was reconstructed and articulated. It was turned into an outdoor attraction, like a massive mechanical puppet, by Sir Clifford. People had to pay to view it! Thomas Beale a Natural Historian and foremost authority on sperm whales came to examine the articulated skeleton. His examination gave the Tunstall Beach whale an eternal life as the first accurate description of a sperm whale ever made! It became known as the ur-whale, that by which all others are measures. Herman Melville subsequently took his anatomical references from Beale's The Natural History of the Sperm Whale, for his novel, Moby Dick. Thus Melville was referring directly to the Tunstall Beach whale. On page 403 of Moby Dick there is a mention of Sir Clifford's whale, at Burton Constable Hall, Yorkshire, and a description of it in its articulated state, at the height of its popularity as an attraction. I believe Melville might have had been to see it too. When this sort of entertainment fell out of fashion, it fell back into the earth, under the feet of cattle, for over one hundred years, until it was re-exhumed. It has been laid out flat in the Great Hall for the past couple of years, which is where I photographed it. I then reconstructed it, bone by bone from the photos to produce my own, scaled down puppet of it as it is now. This model has been called 'Vestigial Vera', as a term of endearment, and because its unnatural for a girl not to give her dolls names! Its unique history has created its unique form. Thus it is a remnant, yet also a new being. Something which looks as though it is long gone, or never existed, it is like a myth; a great white immortal monster, as Melville says about Moby Dick; an immaculate yet blasphemous creation. Terraqueous, the painting from the model, is thus an ambiguous character as was Melville's Moby Dick. Perhaps it is a remnant of an ancient animal that surely existed, or the vestige of something alone, 'other', unique and mythological, that never existed outside of the imagination.