Bernard Rudden’s Exhibition Ars Animalis is on display in Summerhall’s unique Dissection Room Bar for the duration of the festival.

A sunlit summer room. Light streams on glass cases as the removers in overalls tape the head, neck and torso of a a horse skeleton.

Brown boxes, mothballs, freeze dried animal sections inside. numbered and placed into steel packing cages.

In the midst of this disappearing menagerie there was the sense of life leaving. A memento mori. in fact the image of the dissecting room is a type of memento mori. Life persists among remains. Life in bones, formaldehyde, in books in the steel dissecting-tables.

Making of Ars Animlis there was the same consideration. To create an installation both mortal and immortal. Of inside and Outside. Anatomy and World. The unity of opposites. The Zen sign Enso O seemed apposite in this respect. It seemed to fit perfectly as a unifying principle.

Enso has no fixed meaning. Its meaning is manifold, strength, enlightenment, harmony, elegance, and the universe. Many of the qualities that occur naturally in the animal world.

I applied it the Pigs and the Hare firstly as an experiment. Then realised fairly quickly that it was a case of “first idea, best idea”. It seemed the bridge between the animal and human world. Between the ideas of Inside and Outside. Between art and life.

There is a wonder and a fear in visioning both inside and outside the body. This revelation is de facto, the continuity of the quotidian life-cycle. Yet is something we rarely, if ever, consider, believing solely in the outer shell.

Ars Animalis offers the chance to view both parts simultaneously.

Bernard Rudden is a filmmaker, photographer and artist. His work includes Hunger Artist, Daybreak, Soul Train and many others. His photographic work can be seen at www.bernardrudden.com