Modern Fossils

Modern Fossils presents a sketch of absences. The work directly displays techniques of enclosure — how we seek to contain and retain the material world — by addressing our grasp of artefacts and more broadly the past. Modern Fossils is a scattered monument of mounts, or armatures typically found in museums to hold, protect and present objects to us. Each of the mounts in Modern Fossils is made to scale to grasp extinct Australian bird species; holotype, fossil and full skeletal remains alike. These armatures which hold the absent forms of extinct species are airborne above acoustic wedges typically found in anechoic chambers — echo free spaces that isolate and dampen the qualities of sound — and presuppose both the absence of what they aim to hold, keep and ‘safeguard’ as well as the birdsongs of these vanished species. Modern Fossils presents itself to us in a state of absent-hood and reminds us that all things are in constant movement and that all things are migratory and transitory, leaving nothing left to grasp. The work explores an understudied aspect of museum display and preservation: how the very apparatus meant to preserve and present specimens can highlight their absence and loss. It investigates the paradox of preservation systems that outlive what they were meant to preserve, addressing a gap in our understanding of how institutional practices of conservation relate to extinction and disappearance.