Museum of Zoology – Skull Notes

This is one of a number of works by Will Maclean inspired by the celebrated Scottish polymath D'Arcy Thompson (1860–1948), after whom the University of Dundee's Zoology Museum is named. This work was acquired by the university alongside a second work by the same artist, Portrait of a Polymath – D’Arcy Thompson’s Daybook, which was purchased with assistance from the Art Fund. Maclean is internationally recognised as a foremost exponent of box construction art, in which he deconstructs and reconstructs found objects in a display of visual thinking. He is the latest in a series of artists (including Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock and Richard Hamilton) to be inspired both by Thompson's pioneering work and his surviving zoological collection at the University museum.