Teän Collection Exhibition

Opening 28 November 2026

In collaboration with the Teän Collection we will bring together for the first time a group of marine mammal skeletons in the Main Gallery.

Alongside the Teän Collection, presentations in Design House and Stable Gallery include work by Henry Moore, Dorothy Cross, Bill Woodrow and young, Vietnamese artist Phan Uyen Thu, exploring responses to the ancient matter of bone and skeletal structure.

Spanning natural history, photography, sculpture and digital practice, the exhibition reveals the enduring fascination with the skeleton as the architecture of a living body.

The Teän Collection

The Teän Collection has been curated and collected by Dr Tim Holt for over 3 decades and will be on public display for the first time. At the heart of the exhibition, a Pilot Whale, Bottlenose Whale and a White-beaked Dolphin will be suspended in the long gallery, allowing viewers to encounter these remarkable specimens, seeming to swim amongst the public at multiple viewpoints. The skeletons reveal the intricate structures that support and shape these marine animals. The repetition of vertebrae, the sweeping curves of the ribs and the delicate articulation of individual bones combine strength with an extraordinary sense of movement. Seen without flesh and skin, the animals’ forms become newly legible, revealing a natural architecture of remarkable complexity and grace.

Bones have long captivated artists for their formal qualities and their wider associations. Their lines, rhythms and interlocking structures offer a vocabulary that is both abstract and deeply familiar. At the same time, bone occupies an ambiguous territory between life and death, presence and absence. It is at once a functional structure and a surviving trace of an individual body. For artists, this tension opens up questions of form, fragility, endurance and the relationship between the natural world and our attempts to understand it.

Stable Gallery

Bill Woodrow

Bill Woodrow, Seychelles Evaluator, 2005

In the Stable Gallery, a selection of sculptures by Bill Woodrow explore the relationship between animal form, skeletal structures and the objects through which we make sense of the world. Woodrow’s distinctive visual language is at once playful and unsettling; familiar forms are dismantled and recombined.

Across these works, the skeleton becomes less a literal representation of anatomy than a way of thinking about structure; how a body might be assembled, what gives it coherence, and how little is needed to suggest a living presence. The branching frameworks introduce an improvised quality, while the carefully composed forms invite close attention to line, balance and the spaces between elements thus setting up a visual enquiry into the relationship between the natural and the constructed.

Shown adjacent to marine specimens, Woodrow’s sculptures offer a striking shift in perspective. Where the Whale and Dolphin bones reveal the actual architecture of animal bodies, Woodrow invents alternative anatomies, prompting us to consider how readily a collection of parts can suggest a whole.

Design House

Dorothy Cross

Dorothy Cross, Galapagos Bone Room (diptych), 2007

In the Design house, photographs by Dorothy Cross bring the viewer into the close proximity with the monumental remains of marine life. Viewed up close, these structures become landscapes in their own right; forms of striking sculptural presence, at once monumental and vulnerable. Cross draws attention to the tension between the extraordinary and the everyday. Removed from the sea and encountered in an ordinary working space, the bones invite us to reconsider how we look at and relate to the natural world. Their scale and intricate construction command attention, while their material presence carries an unmistakable sense of absence. What remains is both a record of a living creature and a compelling arrangement of lines and spaces.

Presented in dialogue with the marine skeletons, Cross encourages a shift between direct encounter and artistic interpretation.

Phan Uyen Thu

Introducing a further perspective, we have invited young, Vietnamese artist Phan Uyen Thu to present digital prints to be projected onto a wall within the Design House. Her work explores preservation, extinction, memory and the passage of time.

In contrast to the physical weight and permanence of bone, the image exists through light. From tangible, physical remains to ephemeral art form Thu poses the question of how the past is recorded and reinterpreted.

Phan Uyen Thu, So this is it?, 2025, Digital Print