This prep room project presents simultaneous research and practices by conservator Kate Pocklington and artist Lucy Davis around the crocodile in Singapore. A discovery of the interior of the century-old animal specimen that was restored for an exhibition in the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum has led Pocklington to continue her research on the specimen in heuristic terms in order to uncover the animal’s eclipsed history by virtue of the Straits’ ambivalent relations with it. The conjecture that Singapore houses its natural habitat reveals the ways in which the crocodile appears and circulates in both folklore and the colonial enterprise. Running parallel to this research display is a revisit on Lucy Davis’s artistic interpretation of the materials of this particular crocodile framed within her bigger “Migrant Ecologies Project” that unpack readings through which we view and study animals and the natural world.

Image: Taxidermied crocodile part, image by Kee Ya Ting

Read More