The New Aberdeen Bestiary is a three-year-long project seeing the involvement of international artists and Peacock printmakers in realising a collaborative print-based project encompassing a range of artforms, exhibitions and texts.

Seven international artists from a variety of cultural and artistic backgrounds, from performance art to textiles, will each choose an animal, real or imagined, and explore its symbolic, social and cultural significance. In close collaboration with Peacock printmakers, they will realise a print, or series of prints, centred around each animal. Over the course of the project, each artist will develop a body of work that will be exhibited at Peacock’s gallery space The Worm. Each exhibition will then offer an occasion for writers to engage with the works on show and develop a text-based response to the visual work. The prints forming the New Aberdeen Bestiary will be exhibited as a complete series for the first time at the Aberdeen Art Gallery in 2024, to mark Peacock’s 50th birthday.

Closely drawing from the medieval illuminated manuscript known as the Aberdeen Bestiary, the New Aberdeen Bestiary offers an opportunity to challenge systems of classification that impose moral and ethical values, and investigate instead the relations between living beings. Rather than offer a settled explanation, the Bestiary gathers new stories and new voices in a multi-faceted, shapeshifting collection that re-evaluates the relationship between human and non-human, animal and beast, and looks at ways to overcome difference through continuous acts of relation. The New Aberdeen Bestiary invites to pay attention not only to what is fixed onto prepared lines, but to what happens in the unexplored territories along the margins.

Bestiaries are a form of illuminated manuscript popular in northern Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Derived from classical texts about the natural world and early Christian works, a bestiary is a compendium of animals, real or imaginary, paired with moralising or allegorical explanations.

Two bestiaries in particular have inspired the New Aberdeen Bestiary. The most significant source is the medieval Aberdeen Bestiary, currently held at the University of Aberdeen’s Special Collection. The other is The Scottish Bestiary, a portfolio of poems by George Mackay Brown and prints by seven Scottish artists, realised at Peacock and published by Paragon Press in 1986.

Produced in England around 1200, the Aberdeen Bestiary arrives in the city in the 17th century, when it enters the library collection at Marischal College. Probably intended and first used as a textbook in an ecclesiastic setting, the Aberdeen Bestiary is remarkable, among works of this kind, not only for the quality of its illustrations, but also for the number of notes, sketches, corrections and markings on its pages. Traces of its past users are also evident in what is missing from the pages: excised illustrations, missing folios, all speak of a travelled history and multiple changes of hands.

The Scottish Bestiary posits itself as a direct descendant of the medieval manuscript, addressing how, while medieval bestiaries were produced in most of northern Europe, one was never made in Scotland. As a publication combining text with fine art prints, however, The Scottish Bestiary aims to bring to Scotland the practice of artist books, florid in the early 20th century, particularly in France, favoured by artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall.

Amongst the animals featured in The Scottish Bestiary are both ones stereotypically associated with Scotland, such as the grouse or the stag, and supernatural creatures derived from folklore, such as the Nuckelavee. The intent is both ironic and motivated by a genuine interest in a sense of national identity founded on collective memory, myth and tradition. These are recurring concerns in the work of George Mackay Brown, the renown Orcadian poet who composed the 19 poems of the collection. On the other hand, the animals featured in the medieval Bestiary reveal its composite nature and the origins of its main sources, the anonymous Physiologus and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, in northern Africa and southern Europe, which in turn derive their animal stories from Indian, Hebrew and Egyptian lore. In the Physiologus and Isidore’s text, and subsequently in bestiaries, these stories are invested with a Christian moralising perspective. Rather than scientific texts giving an accurate representation of the world, therefore, they become prescriptive tales to direct mankind’s behaviour.

Engaging in a dialogue with both works, the New Aberdeen Bestiary challenges aspects of both and opens new ways to engage with the other and the animal. Prompted by the amount of marginalia in the medieval text, the notes, comments and corrections, the sketches and doodles that move away from the pagina into the unbound wilderness of the margins, the New Aberdeen Bestiary looks at the liminal spaces between categories, where categories shift and morph into one another; the blurry areas between animal and beast. Rather than keeping to one nation’s boundaries, it opens them up to other cultures and traditions, allowing them to mix and mingle.

Rooted in Peacock’s ethos of making, the Bestiary uses contemporary art and printmaking to proposes an ethos of collaborative working and a slow time. As a project involving a wide span of artists, practitioners, writers and curators, the Bestiary holds their different voices – at times, different languages – in the same place, advocating for a way of living and working through communities and collectives that make use of everyone’s individual knowledge. This reflects Peacock’s own approach to printmaking, as a form of art that is open and encouraging to encounters with other mediums: not only by collaborating with artists who are not primarily printmakers, but, through Peacock’s open access model, by allowing in creative practitioners from all paths and levels of training.

Medieval manuscripts are works of craftsmanship, patience and manual skill. Working with print, the New Aberdeen Bestiary asserts the value and importance of the handmade, brings attention to the high degree of material and technical knowledge involved. Even though it is aided by all kinds of technological means, printmaking remains an art form rooted in patient manual work, in proximity with materials that ultimately dictate and shape the processes. The pace of the Bestiary exhibitions, unfolding over the span of three years, the tempo of collaborative printmaking, demands a slower time. Against vertiginous rhythms of production and consumption demanded by all areas of contemporary, capitalist urban life, with their devastating repercussions on the entire planet, the New Aberdeen Bestiary proposes to slow down the pace, pay closer attention, and get distracted by those that stand outside the paved road.