How plastic is used to model the past
I have been working with the Jurassic Coast Trust on the Mesozoic Residency for the past eighteen months with Adele Keeley (Senior Lecturer in Performance Design at AUB). The Jurassic Coast is a World Heritage Site, covers 95 miles of Dorset and Devon Coast Line and is often called the ‘birthplace of paleontology’. During our time working with the Trust, we’ve been thinking about rocks and Earth Sciences. We’ve been hugely helped by the fantastic team at the Jurassic Coast, particularly so on scientific matters by Sam Scriven and Anjana Ford. We’ve been making costumes, art-work and performance which engages and inspires people into talking and thinking about the Jurassic Coast. Our aim has been to create work which is visually stunning as well as scientifically stimulating.
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| Dinosaur collection. Photo by Lorna Rees |
This glorious process has reignited my passion for the small plastic renderings of prehistoric creatures, which you can find in toyshops all over the world. Those beautiful marine reptiles and dinosaurs you can hold in your hand. They are the way after all, that most children start to learn about the Earth’s history – that before we were on the planet these incredible creatures walked the earth. Children are still deeply passionate about their plastic T-Rexes and Triceratops and Diplodocuses. I have an abiding memory of wondering up at the amazing fossil cast of Dippy in the Natural History Museum’s Hintze Hall, whilst also clutching a small plastic figure of him tightly to my chest.
Because,
I love toy dinosaurs. I have loved them since I was a child. I would play with
them, make dioramas for them and they happily co-existed with my He-Man toys
and my sister’s Barbies. One of
the things about them is their texture – they’re almost warm to touch, pliable,
not hard plastic, but soft and slightly supple. Often, I would prise the mouth
of a roaring T-Rex wider in order to wedge in some unsuspecting herbivore and
pretend it was savaging that stegosaurs’ throat. When my own children played
with toy dinosaurs I would happily get involved – sitting for hours whilst
complex games of ‘bad’ dinosaurs (the carnivores) battled against the ‘good’
dinosaurs (the veggies). These toys helped us to move on to fossil hunting and
looking at rocks and we’re lucky enough to live near an extraordinary stretch
of coastline, which allows us to do so.
But – despite
my great affection for rocks, I’m still drawn to these lovely renderings of
prehistoric animals from the Earth’s past, and in our time working with the
Jurassic Coast Trust I started to collect toys which would be useful to showing
others something of the creatures who used to swim and walk this bit of land we
live on now.
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| These two toys are supposed to represent the same animal, the Scelidosaurus. Photo by Lorna Rees. |
Some
of the worst toy design-interpretations are created because they’ve been made using
old science as their inspiration point. The best, because in the design process
they’ve so thoroughly considered what the most recent paleontology has to
offer. Of course, not all toy manufacturers really care about accuracy – they
want something to be understood as a ‘dinosaur’ even if it’s only been very vaguely
modeled on a Ray Harryhausen film from the 1960s. But we’ve found that children
really do care about the accuracy of their toys – I’ve met so many young enthusiasts
during my time working with the Jurassic Coast Trust and so many of these
experts (from ages 4 -11) could fiercely debate with you on the relative size
of a T-Rex’s eye vs. an Icthyosaur's.
During
our research, we’ve found that other people are incredibly keen on how accurate
these toys are too – and we found lots of them are grown ups. Of course, the Early
Learning Centre toy T-Rex my children own, which has a cannon mounting on it
from which Imaginex people can fire – I’m not suggesting that kind of easy
target should be offered up for realism, but lots of people take the modeling
and the thought that goes into making toy dinosaurs incredibly seriously.
One of
my favourite channels on youtube is ‘Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong’ by the Geek
Group where Steven Bellettini describes what is wrong with various Dinosaur
toys. I find it beguiling and watchable - you also inadvertently
learn a lot about dinosaurs too.
From
there, it is all too easy to disappear down an internet rabbit hole of Dinosaur
toy reviews. There are quite a few of them. http://dinotoyblog.com
has both
adults and children reviewing the dinosaurs, and a brilliant side bar of links
if you want to while away some hours. As with paleoartists (if you don’t know
the term Paeloartist then look at the work of Dr Mark Witton – one of the very
best in the world http://www.markwitton.com) many of these reviewers are often hugely
versed on the newest paleontological findings, some of them in fact being reviewed
by professional Paleontologists.
Toy
dinosaurs are made by a fascinating casting and hard plastic molding process,
which goes into creating toy dinosaurs/marine reptiles. A great video of the
making process can be seen below:
Patiently, model makers piece
together their toys casts, drawing on information from the skeleton of fossil finds, how the musculature might have worked and even, most recently,
what tiny clues there might be in fragments of fossilized skin pigmentation.
Other clues artists might use is convergent evolution – the idea that creatures
evolve in similar ways to other ones in similar habitats, even though they
might be say, reptiles and mammals, for example Plesiosaurs and Dolphins. I
have a lovely marine reptile toy, which nicely mimics the lightening and
darkening of pigmentation, which porpoises have on their bodies. Other more
recent dinosaur toys sport colorful stripes, which utilise markings of tropical
lizards or rainforest birds.
For
Adele and I, in terms of our artistic process during our residency, we’ve used
toys to inspire us. They’re bright, and modern looking. They connect us with
‘now’ as well as to the ancient and as artists it’s an amazing palette of
colour to work with. We’ve been particularly taken with the idea that plastic
is made from ‘fossil fuels’ and that toy dinosaurs are made from plastic…. that
there is a strange cycle that the oil which helps to create these tiny (and
often beautiful and accurate science-based) representations of dinosaurs comes
from their fossils. This isn’t strictly the scientific case, the substance
which makes oil and natural gas is a sort of oceanic gloop of organic matter;
but it’s near enough to get us thinking about what we make plastic with in the first
place, the ancient organisms which once lived on this planet, millions of years
before we evolved. I have frequently felt humbled and overwhelmed during this
project by the processes of time itself. Perhaps, I hope, our work might help
to put us in our place a little.
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Costumes
inspired by the colours of toy dinosaurs. Photo by Dominic Old.
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| The Anthropocene. Photo by Dominic Old. |
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Costume accessories for Mesozoic. Photo by Lorna Rees.
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Stop motion video created by Rufus Rees-Coshan.
Lorna Rees (Guest blogger)
NOTES
Lorna
Rees is Artistic Director of
Gobbledegook Theatre
Adele
Keeley is Senior Lecturer Arts University Bournemouth
From 2016 – 2018 Gobbledegook
have worked closely with the Jurassic Coast Trust as Artists in Residence for
the Big Jurassic Classroom, and Natural History Museum’s Dippy on Tour project.
The Jurassic Coast Trust inspires conservation, understanding and engagement
along the 95 miles of UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Working with world-renowned
geologists, paleontologists, fossil hunters and scientists from numerous
interrelated disciplines, Gobbledegook have made work about life on Earth,
concentrating on the Mesozoic Era. The Mesozoic is an interval of
geological time: 180 million years, which encompass the Triassic, Jurassic and
the Cretaceous periods.
The research and development phase of this project has
been funded by the Primary Science Teaching Trust, The Natural History Museum
and the Garfield Weston Foundation. It is supported by Arts University
Bournemouth.
