ENDLINGS: DRAWING EXTINCTION

Description

There are many different approaches to drawing animals. In particular there was a shift in the 19th century away from French idealism towards an approach, led by British artists such as Edward Lear, that prioritised drawing direct from nature. The work of Amy Dover, a fine artist and illustrator based in Newcastle, England, draws upon some of these histories and blends realistic life drawing with memory and imagination. 

Dover has recently been working on an ongoing project entitled Endlings, which takes as its subject of focus animals that are under threat of extinction. For her MFA exhibition at Edinburgh College of Art, Dover showed alongside her distinctive drawings a text installation that included all of the animals on the IUCN red list of threatened species. The installation included not only the animals’ Latin names but their common descriptions too. This brutally systematic list of names was a haunting accompaniment to Dover’s drawings, which are always so full of character and life.