×Transcript of a talk given at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2023. Entitled ‘Auk egg palimpsest: critical-creative explorations of eggshell as archive’, this formed part of a panel on ‘Nature in/and/of the Archive’, organised by Dr. Jessica Lehman and Dr. Aya Nassar:

This talk engages with “the archival impulse”—with what Kathryn Yusoff describes as historical cultural practices that have been used to “approach and respond to life, predominantly through the organisation of its dead subjects”.[i] Here, the natural history collection represents a particular, prevalent attitude towards life in which the wish to know something of its extraordinary variety led to the partial creation of a dead body-double of its diversity within the museum. Certainly, through the critical eye of much recent scholarship, such collections become sites that reveal ongoing historical inequities in power, which manifest through culturally-specific desires to possess, and order.[ii] But as well as this critical impulse, this talk is also occupied with a second archival inclination, this time within the field of contemporary art. Here, artists engage creatively with the subject of the archive, the power inherent in it, and the activity of ordering, or archiving in their work. Elaborating on objects, images, and texts, these works partly aim to retrieve historical information—often hidden or lost—and disturb it in a gesture towards alternative knowledge-making or counter-memory.[iii]

The work I want to introduce in this talk emerges from the nest formed from these two often interwoven approaches. It involves some somewhat experimental fieldwork practices, which employ artistic process to synthesise a nuanced, layered response to a historic extirpation—a local extinction—highlighting the potential for creative practice to work with critical approaches to the archive and its legacies to develop, in Yusoff’s words, more “careful… practices”.[iv] In doing so, it recognises the link between landscape and archive, and moves between them. As Johanne Bruun has recently highlighted, natural history collections are co-extensive with particular landscapes. Specimens are archives of places and histories, just as much as they are of species.[v] Here, ethically-minded practices in the archive—hopefully—open spaces to configure novel ways of living with others elsewhere in a world marked by increasing extinction.

So, embarking on this movement through the expanded archive, I want to begin on Papay, a tiny island on the northern periphery of Orkney, an archipelago located some way north of mainland Scotland. I am working just above the shoreline. Across a shallow bay lies the Holm of Papa, an even smaller island. Surrounding me on the grass are a set of unconventional academic tools and materials for engaging with constellations of place and archive; mixing bowl, moulds, wooden stirrers, and gypsum-based mineral resin. In my palm is a large, white egg that has just emerged intact from one of my moulds. Pointed at one end, rounded at the other—it could, perhaps, be called conical, or pyriform. The egg is the beginning stage of an artwork, and is a direct replica of that of a great auk, a large, flightless, now extinct seabird. It is one of over one hundred or so eggs I have just spent two weeks casting on the shoreline overlooking the Holm, which is thought to have been one of the auks’ former breeding grounds.

Though not the last of these birds in existence, a pair of great auks was killed here on Papay in the years 1812 and 1813. Known locally as the “King and Queen of the Aaks”,[vi] they were the last to be seen in Orkney, with only a few later accounts marking the species’ continued existence elsewhere around the North Atlantic. The female bird was killed first. She was struck with a stone while sitting on an egg, but her body was lost to the sea. Present on the island at the time of this death was the collector William Bullock, who is said to have then pursued the male bird in a rowing boat for many hours, but without being able to kill him. However, after he left the island—presumably having left a reward for its body, similar to one he placed for a snowy owl resident on nearby North Ronaldsey that same year—the auk was shot by a local man, William Foulis, as he tried to flee from a crannie at the base of Fowl Craig—a seabird cliff on the island. It was then preserved and sent to Bullock in London.

This story is a typical one. Formerly numbering in the millions, it was the great auks’ breeding colonies that became the sites of their extinction; the places where their flightlessness made them vulnerable, and they were slaughtered in huge numbers—initially by European sailors and colonists for meat, eggs, and feathers, but eventually also by and for wealthy individuals seeking examples for their collections. Indeed, the final disappearance of the auk in the mid-nineteenth-century was caused by museums and private collectors (such as Bullock) rushing to procure rare and valuable specimens of these birds and their eggs.[vii]

The crannie now occupied by the King of the Aaks is far-removed from the exposure blackened cliffs of Fowl Craig—a metal cabinet in an offshoot of the Natural History Museum in Tring, just outside London, which holds the museum’s collections of bird skins and eggs. This is a space which is pulled—through the auk’s presence—into connective-resonance with the island. But it is not on this specimen that I wish to focus here, but on another aspect of the auks’ lingering materiality held in these collections.

That materiality is the museum’s collection of great auk eggs, of which it holds six of the 80 or so that remain worldwide. Each of these eggs is cream-coloured, but is otherwise unique. Each is a different size, shape, and has diverse markings patterning their surfaces. Looking at them, I see variously, black and brown blotches and streaks, green splashes, and delicate pencilling. These patterns are unique to the female bird that laid them, and enabled them to recognise their eggs within densely packed colonies.[viii] They are produced from pigments formed in that individual bird’s blood and bile, a bodily echo of that bird’s ecological context, given that particular foods absorbed transform an organism’s being, blurring the boundaries between body and environment.[ix] But when I ask the curator in charge of their care about them, he tells me the markings on these old eggs are not stable, and are now very faded, bearing very little resemblance to their past vibrancy. These marks are now fading records of lost historical lifeworlds—from which the birds are now absent.

Returning to Papay, I am once again holding in my hand one of my replica auk eggs, but this time I can barely see it. I am in the island darkroom and it is almost pitch black. A red safelight glows in the corner. In my other hand I hold a pipette full of photographic emulsion, a light-sensitive suspension of silver halide used in analogue photography to coat paper and other surfaces for printing. I am covering the eggs with markings, using the pipette to dribble the emulsion over their surfaces, blotching them and scraping lines, mimicking the patterns I saw on the eggs at the Natural History Museum, but much more crudely. Once they’ve all been coated, the eggs will be transported by boat to the Holm, which—if you’ll remember—is the possible site of one of the auks’ former breeding colonies. Here they will be left to expose on the island in specially-made pinhole cameras for a duration of 42 days, an estimation of the birds old incubation period,[x] and at a time that coincides with when they once came ashore to breed.[xi] Over this time, the marks I have made will darken, before eventually being developed and fixed in place back here in the darkroom. A second round of marks will then be applied, which will be given a brief period of direct exposure to the sun on the clifftop at Fowl Craig, some 15 meters directly above the site where the King of the Aaks was killed. Combined with their time on the Holm, this multi-layered process gathers an exposure of time, weather, and historically-significant place onto the surfaces of the eggs.

Conceptually, this process is also multi-layered. My work here acts as a form of creative repatriation—returning something of an extinct or extirpated species to the spaces from which they have become estranged.[xii] Coming back to the topic of the archival-impulse introduced earlier these are critical artistic practices which draw on zoological collections as resources for creatively telling complex histories of human-animal encounter, often in the wake of extractive scientific and colonial activities,[xiii] recontextualizing these specimens beyond their lingering fate as catalogues of empire, or as representative forms of species ‘type,’ and revitalizing their histories in the process.[xiv]

But to focus in on the subject of this panel, a further layer of meaning to my eggs emerges from archival insight. Looking again at the real eggs held in the museum at Tring, other marks also dot their surfaces; pencilled initials, names, dates of ownership, catalogue marks, Linnean descriptors. These too are marks of biography, mingling with and to an extent overlaying the fading marks left by the anonymous female auks, tying the eggs instead to the narratives and identities of particular egg collectors, collections, and institutions. Eggshell here becomes a sort of palimpsest where later writing overwrites previous meaning. Instead of speaking of animal individuality, or ecological lifeworld, the shells now also reveal the process of possession and assimilation through which they have been transformed—via a succession of owners—from lively vessels with the potential of becoming animal into objects of natural history knowledge.

Archives, though, are not storehouses of immutable truths, they are, to quote Bruun, “stable yet malleable technological frameworks” that allow the production of new knowledges from their contents.[xv] If eggshell is palimpsest, that does not preclude further additions being made to its surfaces; ones that do not efface that which has preceded it, but which acknowledge the violences, and erasures visible in past layers, and responds to them, aiming to find new ways of engaging with both object histories, and with the spaces of the world the archive seeks to mimic through their inclusion.

The great auk however, no longer holds a lively presence in the world. The artwork I am in the process of describing is a response to its extinction. Building towards the conclusion of this talk, I want to quickly detail the photographic markings applied to the surfaces of my eggs, and what I think they might be doing. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes of the ontology of photography; what it is in itself.[xvi] For him, behind every photograph is a gesture belonging to the camera’s operator, which freezes a moment that immediately recedes into the past. The photograph, when viewed, recalls this past moment, and by doing so often returns the dead to us.[xvii] To illustrate this, Barthes intersperses his writing with images, or descriptions of them; including that of a photograph of his mother as a child standing in a Winter Garden, a glassed-in conservatory, that he finds shortly after her death. This photograph is bound up in the process of mourning, reminding him of how child-like she was as he helped her drink tea as she lay dying. For Barthes, the pain of the loss of his mother is ongoing, and alters the quality of the remaining time of his life. Such feelings resurface from memories provoked by his viewing the photograph—this is what he calls the punctum of the photographic image—the incidental details they capture—a face, or a stilled gesture—that rise from a scene to bruise us, reminding us of the ongoing passage of time, or of the pain we feel for the loss of something irreplaceable.[xviii] But importantly here to my own work, Barthes also begins to articulate a conceptualization of the base chemical elements of analogue photography as something that is just as important in this as the representational element of the process: “the action of light”, by which the photograph “is born on the level of sprouting silver grains”.[xix] Photography for Barthes is a process, almost of alchemy, in which bodies are immortalized both in and through time by the mediation of a precious metal, silver.

So to conclude, as I mark the surfaces of my eggs, I do so with Barthes in mind; pushing his thought towards this alchemical abstraction, towards his sprouting grains of silver. Here it is not the representation that holds the emotional pinprick of the “that-has-been” but the light-sensitive silver-halides that underlie the image. This is a working with photography that is also a working against it; an abandoning of its representational prowess, it’s ability—to use Susan Sontag’s phrase—to take a stencil “off the real”.[xx] The marks on my eggs are not representations; they are patterns that refer to the auks, that mourn them—that attempt to remember or cite them, but that reveal only the inaccessibility of their former lifeworlds, their otherness, the uniqueness of their species-being; and how all of these irreplaceable things are now absent. Through this, they could be said to be finding alternative modes, and new ways of making ecological knowledge both with—and in response to—the legacies of the expanded-archive.

References:

[i] Yusoff, K., ‘Biopolitical Economies and the Political Aesthetics of Climate Change’, Theory, Culture & Society, 27, 2010, pp.73-99, p.76.

[ii] Bruun, J., ‘The field and its prosthesis: Archiving Arctic ecologies in the 1920s’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 47, 2022, pp.1058-1074.

[iii] Foster, H., ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, 110, 2004, pp.3-22.

[iv] Yusoff, ‘Biopolitical Economies,’ p.77

[v] Greer, K., ‘Geopolitics and the Avian Imperial Archive: The Zoogeography of Region- Making in the Nineteenth-Century British Mediterranean’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103, pp. 1317–31.

[vi] Buckley, T. E. & Harvie-Brown, J. A., The vertebrate fauna of the Orkney Islands (Edinburgh, David Douglas, 1891).

[vii] Gaskell, J., Who killed the great auk? (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000); Fuller, E., The Great Auk (Southborough, Errol Fuller, 1999).

[viii] Birkhead, T., The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg (New York, Bloomsbury, 2016).

[ix] Pálsson, G., ‘Ensembles of biosocial relations,’ in: Ingold, T. & Pálsson, G., eds. Biosocial becomings: integrating social and biological anthropology (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2013).

[x] Birkhead, T., ‘The chick-rearing period of the Great Auk: a mystery solved,’ British Birds, 114, 2021, pp.27-30.

[xi] Montevecchi, W. A., & Kirk, D. A., The Birds of North America (Ithaca, NY, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 1996).

[xii] Patchett, M., Foster, K., and Lorimer, H., ‘The Biogeographies of a Hollow-Eyed Harrier,’ in: Alberti, S., The afterlives of animals: a museum menagerie (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2011); McIntyre, S., ‘Collected Silences for Lord Rothschild,’ (Available at:); McIntyre, S., ‘Twin signals at Silver Stream (fragments of a landscape for specimens #50.766 & #50.767),’ (Available at: < https://radiocegeste.blogspot.com/2018/11/twin-signals-at-silver-stream-fragments.html>).

[xiii] Patchett, Foster, & Lorimer,’Biogeographies;’ Westergaard, G., ‘Colonial entanglement in extinction narratives: The afterlives of two Saint Lucia giant rice rats,’ Journal of Natural Science Collections,11, 2023 pp.3–12.

[xiv] Patchett, M., & Foster, K., ‘Repair work: surfacing the geographies of dead animals,’ Museum and Society, 6, 2008, pp.98–122, p.98

[xv] Bruun, ‘The field,’ see Yusoff, ‘Biopolitical Economies’.

[xvi] Barthes, R., Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London, Vintage, 2020).

[xvii] Barthes, ‘Camera Lucida’

[xviii] Sontag, ‘On Photography (London, Penguin, 2008), p.154.

[xix] Barthes, ‘Camera Lucida,’ p.113.

[xx] Sontag, ‘On Photography,’ p.154.