A pile of something resembling chocolate raisins is displayed on what looks like a cake base. There’s an artful assemblage of something the size and shape of oysters – and isn’t that chocolate torte and sticky toffee pudding over there?
“They look like something from Bake Off,” says Tracey Lee, an artist and former zookeeper, whose unique collection of animal excrement goes on public display for the first time this weekend in London.
From the distinctive square nuggets of the wombat to the minuscule hand grenades of the death’s head hawkmoth caterpillar, the produce of 120 different rear ends make up The Origin of the Faeces: Poo at the Zoo.
The exhibition, which opens at Fusebox in Kingston upon Thames, is the result of more than 20 years of collecting, which began for Lee when she had to say goodbye to her favourite elephant, Geetha. One evening in 2001, she loaded the elephants on to trucks to move them from London Zoo to ZSL’s sister zoo, Whipsnade, so they could enjoy more space.
“When you work with these animals you fall in love with them. They become your family,” she says. “You’re with them from 7.30 in the morning until 6.30 at night. If they’re sick, you stay overnight with them. You’re there on Christmas Day. As the truck left and drove out into the dark, I remember feeling really bereft. It was awful. I picked up one of Geetha’s poos, held it and thought, ‘This is the last thing I have of Geetha.’”
Lee was awakened to the artistic potential of number twos in the 1990s when, as elephant keeper, she collected elephant dung for the artist Chris Ofili, drying it in the zoo’s boiler room.
When London Zoo’s rhinos, Rosie and Jos, were also moved to more spacious zoos, Lee took another memento. “I know you shouldn’t have favourites but I just loved Jos to bits. I picked up his poo and put it next to Geetha’s in the boiler room. I know it sounds weird. And that’s how it began.”
Over the next two decades, Lee assembled her collection, drying out the stools and storing them in a friend’s barn and in her allotment shed. She would visit friends working at other zoos and leave with a car boot-load of crap.
For authentic splatter, she drops them on to a mount from the same height as the animal’s bum, and preserves them in PVA glue.
Although now odourless and hygienic, the exhibits are a feast for the senses.
Okapi (forest giraffe) manure looks like glossy chocolate raisins. Zebra dung is the same shape and size as oysters. The sizeable discharge of the Galápagos tortoise “looks like a giant tadpole or sperm with the tail on them”, thinks Lee, who two years ago moved from keeper duties to become ZSL’s “creative operative” – painting zoo spaces, leaflets and signs.
Elephant excrement is unexpectedly modest but they produce 10 or more of each chunk at a time. The strangest faecal matter belongs to Zaire, one of London Zoo’s most cherished gorillas, who died three years ago. It looks like a giant kebab.
“She was an absolutely wonderful animal, funny and intelligent and just beautiful,” says Lee. “She was very greedy and used to barge everyone out of the way to get the best bits of food – she did giant poos because she ate so much.”
The exhibition includes donations from endangered birds – collected on canvasses placed below their favourite perches – reptiles and invertebrates.
The stinkiest – before being dried and made hygienic – belonged to the African wild dog. The smallest offering was probably the grape seed-sized poos of the Partula snail, extinct in the wild but being reintroduced via captive-breeding programmes.
The exhibition, which runs until 28 October, already has more than 1,000 schoolchildren booked to see it.
Robin Hutchinson, founder of the exhibition organisers The Community Brain and the charity Creative Youth, says: “This is a brilliant exhibition because it gives visitors permission to talk about poo – and that’s something that appeals to people of all ages. I’m especially keen to use Tracey’s amazing exhibition to connect young people to the real plight of the natural world.”
But one mammal is not represented in the collection. “The only one I haven’t done is human,” says Lee. “Please don’t ask – no way!”
The Origin of the Faeces: Poo at the Zoo, Fusebox, Kingston Riverside, 7-28 October, free entry.
