Tate Britain

Jamie Shovlin is interested in the tension between truth and fiction, reality and invention. His painstakingly researched and executed works combine inherently flawed systems, pseudo-scientific exactitude and doubtful philosophical propositions with the seemingly objective experience of the archive. Shovlin’s work questions the way in which we map and classify the world around us in order to understand it.

For Art Now, Shovlin has created new work which uses the conventions of museological display and wildlife documentaries. Using drawings, collage, text, sound recordings and projections, the installation explores a juxtaposition of his mother’s subjective view of the wildlife in her suburban garden with the scientific rigour of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, as set out in The Origin of Species (1859).