Creature

The Creature project is rooted in a childhood fascination with the dioramas at The Smithsonian and the Museum of Natural History. Aesthetically, the project was directly inspired by the illustrative indexing of 19th century naturalists like John James Audubon, whose drawings offer viewers the chance to view birds outside of their environmental context—the unfamiliarity of which can act as a barrier between the viewer and the subject.

Modern imaging technology allows the studio to eradicate these boundaries entirely, creating accurate, life-sized two-dimensional representations of animals composed of many images stitched together through a kind of photographic taxidermy. This in turn allows viewers to see each subject in complete and perfect focus—a kind of viewing that is impossible through a single photograph, or in daily life.

Not only is his art the perfect encounter between technical invention and perfection - and aesthetic and expressive exploration. His 1:1 animals - that are essentially hyper realistic portraits of animals reproduced in full scale - seem at first like ordinary animal photography. But by having eliminated their natural habitat - the jaw dropping beauty and forms and textures of the biosphere become enjoyable in all their complexity. The animal like an objet trouvé in the art gallery. And then you realize that they are actually paintings rather than photographs - because it is a photograph that is impossible to take - its resolution defies all existing technology. So the elephant is photographed and then repainted in post by putting together tens or hundreds of details into a full scale - full resolution - full size elephant.
–BJARKE INGELS, Graphis, Issue 358

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Creature Book