unnatural histories

Paul Kilsby is an artist, writer and lecturer specialising in fine art photography. After completing a Ph D at the Royal College of Art he continued working there for many years as a tutor; he is currently a senior lecturer in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University and a tutor at Abingdon & Witney College. He has work in public and private collections in France, America, Russia, Italy and the UK; both his photography and his writing have featured in magazines, journals and books internationally and he has exhibited extensively throughout the UK as well as in France, Russia, Spain, Bulgaria and Turkey.


As the writer James Attlee has observed of the photographs in this exhibition, 'nothing is necessarily what it seems'. The photographs of nocturnal encounters between predators and their prey are, in fact, staged tableaux using taxidermy specimens, gentle parodies of the hypervisual natural history documentaries we see on our screens which always require Nature to be seen at her very most spectacular. Similarly, the photographs of flowers in the series Flora Nova are equally fabricated, each stem bearing blooms of different species as impossible hybrids, a reference to genetic modification as Nature is ‘improved’ upon by Culture. Throughout all the photographs, facilitated by various trompe l’oeil strategies, there is a shared fascination in this oscillation of object/image status : the bonsai trees in these photographs, after all, are real trees but also images of trees; a taxidermy bird is both a real bird and an image of a bird; Culture masquerades as Nature. Nothing here is quite what it first seems.