The 50th anniversary of Peacock – a workshop for art, Aberdeen’s renowned print studio, is being marked with an exhibition of the New Aberdeen Bestiary at Aberdeen Art Gallery.
The exhibition is the culmination of a three-year collaborative project involving Peacock printmakers and seven international artists from a variety of cultural and artistic backgrounds, from performance art to textiles. The artists are Abdulrazaq Awofeso, Delaine Le Bas, Joy Charpentier, Carla Felipe, Julio Jara, Sadie Main and Pedro G Romero.
Delaine Le Bas is one of the four nominees for this year’s Turner Prize, the UK’s most prestigious prize for contemporary art.
Bestiaries are a form of illuminated manuscript popular in northern Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Derived from classical texts about the natural world and early Christian works, a bestiary is a compendium of animals, paired with moralising or allegorical explanations.
The New Aberdeen Bestiary has been inspired by the 12th-century illuminated manuscript known as the Aberdeen Bestiary. It arrived in Aberdeen during the 17th century when it entered the library collection at Marischal College. It is now in the collections of the University of Aberdeen. Prompted by the amount of marginalia in the medieval text, the notes, comments and corrections, sketches and doodles, 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.
