Margate: Curiosity: Art and The Pleasure of Knowing

French, Cabinet on stand with ebony veneer and internal fruitwood and ivory marquetry, c. 1650

Geffrye Museum, London

The Horniman Museum's famous stuffed Walrus

courtesy Horniman Museum and Gardens

J. M. W. Turner, Peacock, from the Farnley Book of Birds, c. 1816

Leeds Museums and Galleries / The Bridgeman Art Library

Philip Henry Gosse, Illustration for Actinologia Britannia plate I, c. 1860

Horniman Museum and Gardens, London, © Heini Schneebeli

King Penguin brought back from an expedition by Ernest Shackelton

Powell Cotton Museum

The artist and writer Brian Dillon has a skilful ability in finding unexpected connections between objects and ideas. This exhibition focuses on the human compulsion for knowledge together with our more frivolous desire for things that are strange and new.

Presenting a veritable cabinet of curiosities taken from museums, galleries and institutions across the nation, Dillon guides audiences through the passions and obsessions of latter day naturalists, and in the process, reveals how these fascinating specimens have influenced the history of art.

Don't miss

There are some lovely artefacts here, from the wonderful woodcut of an iron clad Rhinoceros made by Albrecht Dürer in the sixteenth-century to some exquisite models of aquatic creatures by the German glassmakers Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka.

From the miniscule to the mammoth, there are detailed illustrations of a flea and a stuffed giant walrus. A penguin collected on Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition reveals just how far humans are prepared to go in their quest for knowledge.