THOMAS McLUCAS

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Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai | Salon to the Mousai |

This salon is a group of three spaces. These spaces are designed in the spirit of three minor Hellenistic gods, three of the nine muses, Thalia, Terpsichore and Urania. The project critiques the Natural History Museum by using ideas from the Birth of Tragedy, through the perspective of characters from antiquity the project focuses around themes of civilisation, high culture and chronology. The project is set in a distorted timeline where Greek gods, Victorian nobility and modern tourists interact.

The three interventions are set in the Bacchic ruin of the Natural History Museum, which becomes the garden in which the follies can be orchestrated. The mise-en-scene resembling that of a picturesque painting, the Roman Campagna or Tintern Abbey.

The museum has been flayed in this way as punishment for presenting an overly picturesque vision of nature. Flaying was a common method of torture in Greek mythology, often in response to undermining the gods, as can been seen in the tale of the satyr Marsyas who challenged Apollo to a musical duel. As Hellenists worshiped pantheistic gods, divine embodiments of aspects of nature, censoring the ugliness and wildness of nature, taming it for display as part of a controlled carefully careless picture, 18th and 19th century methods of natural representation and study are sinful. These picturesque ideals alongside scientific truths conjured by the dominance of visual study at the time were at odds with one another and the museum became an embodiment of this.