Theo Reeves-Evison describes in his essay Surface Fictions an artifact and popular attraction at South Londons Horniman Museum; a walrus that was taxidermied without any image reference or personal experience or sighting, by a nineteenth-century taxidermist.

The taxidermist completely filled out the skin, not aware of the great folds and wrinkles that we all know today that walruses have. The result is a humorously bloated, giant bulbous shape of walrus-ness.

The exploration of how the exterior communicates its interior, posits the object as fiction, and expands into an exploration of the seam between interior and exterior, and discusses the walrus as an object aligned with Fredric Jameson’s proposed postmodern ‘depthlessness’ and Deleuze’s argument and vocabulary of interiority, exteriority, falsehood and mimesis to redefine the concept of simulacrum.

Taking this essay as a starting point, I’m creating lines and crevices which map potential multiple imagined shapes, objects or entities that may be something else.