January 9, 2025
Dr Abbi Flint, Research Associate in English at Oxford University (UK)
and
Dr Rose Ferraby, independent archaeologist and artist (UK)
Title: Fish Out of Water: Exploring the History, Meaning and Materiality of a Museum Mercreature
Abstract:
On 7 July 1906 an unusual object was donated to the Natural History Society of Northumberland, Durham, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s Hancock Museum (Newcastle, UK), described by the curator at the time as a ‘grotesque “mermaid” from Japan’. Similar artefacts were widely exhibited as curiosities in western Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, most famously by the American showman P.T. Barnum under the title of the ‘FeeJee Mermaid’. Typically, they appeared to be the mummified remains of a creature with a front half that resembled a primate and a rear half that resembled a fish, and their exhibition attracted the interest of both natural scientists and wider publics alike. There are at least ten such artefacts in museums across the UK, often slipping between collection categories.
This paper will discuss a small project funded by the Newcastle University Catherine Cookson Foundation, which explored the history, materiality, and meaning of this museum mercreature. In particular, I was interested in how this artefact had made its way to Newcastle, the journeys it had made both physically and culturally; how and from what the artefact was constructed; its history within the museum; and, what meanings it held in the past and present. The project piloted an innovative approach, drawing together archival, scientific, and creative research methods (poetry and collage) to reveal the stories surrounding this fascinating object. The project surfaced further questions about how we think about, and with, speculative, hybrid artefacts like the mercreature – an object that sits between sea and land, between cultures, between species, and between collection categories – and its place in (un)natural histories.