Hannah Matthews explores women’s safety, gossip and the transmission of experiences through generations using taxidermy and animatronics. The work considers gossip as a means of circulating stories and warnings. It also draws artistic inspiration from experiments investigating intergenerational responses to learned odour associations in rats, raising questions about inherited fear, memory and collective knowledge.

Part of Memory Library, 14–21 November 2026. Find out more here.

Artist Bio:

My practice is primarily centred around taxidermy and natural history preservation although fundamentally I am a sculptor with a background in painting and printmaking. I am interested in ideas of myth, legend, storytelling, memory, time, secrets, memorialisation and the idea of the immortal. The natural world has always been a great source of wonder to me and working with organic materials perpetually deepens my admiration and allows me to share this with an audience that would otherwise perhaps never be able to appreciate animals in such close proximity.

Humankind has a long history of understanding and navigating our world with stories interwoven with animal imagery and my work is underpinned by this tradition. The pieces I make often include preserved animals interacting with human objects, creating moments suspended in time eluding to wider narratives and engaging audience imagination.