Michele Beevors' 'The Anatomy Lesson: After Stubbs' (2014) in Good Bones at The Dowse Art Museum. Photo by Elias Rodriguez for Mark Tantrum Photography.
Michele Beevors’ Frogs (The Dead Heart) (2014) in Good Bones at The Dowse Art Museum. Photo by Elias Rodriguez for Mark Tantrum Photography.
Michele Beevors' 'Talley's Giraffe' (2021) in Good Bones at The Dowse Art Museum. Shown alongside Whanganui Regional Museum taxidermy collection. Photo by Elias Rodriguez for Mark Tantrum Photography.
Michele Beevors' 'Tales of Sorrow and Regret' (2017) in Good Bones at The Dowse Art Museum. Photo by Elias Rodriguez for Mark Tantrum Photography.
Michele Beevors' 'Epitaph' (2022) in Good Bones at The Dowse Art Museum. Photo by Elias Rodriguez for Mark Tantrum Photography.
Michele Beevors' 'The Anatomy Lesson: After Stubbs' (2014) in the foreground of Good Bones at The Dowse Art Museum. Photo by Elias Rodriguez for Mark Tantrum Photography.
In Good Bones, Dunedin-based artist Michele Beevors presents life-sized sculptures of skeletal animals knitted in yarn. Ranging from a tragic circus elephant to an army of frogs, her woolly menagerie is a spectacle of sad splendor that considers our troubled relationship with animals past and present. Placing natural history specimens into domestic settings, Beevors’ soft sculptures ask hard questions about the histories of collecting, displaying, and preserving these creatures and their stories within the current reality of a deteriorating climate.
Michele Beevors is an Australian-born sculptor based in Dunedin, New Zealand. She currently works as a Senior Lecturer and Studio Coordinator for Sculpture and Ceramics. Beevors holds an MA from Australian National University and an MFA from Columbia University in New York.
Michele Beevors, Zarafa. Courtesy of the artist.