I took pictures in the natural history museum in Venice. There were rooms stacked with animal heads. There were no labels or information—just the walls covered, floor to ceiling, with trophies—mounted heads and animal pelts and stuffed animals on the floor. It was creepy and disgusting. It says so much about the people who assembled this collection. This is not a display about natural history. It’s about hunters and collectors. About a need to own and control. And so, by implication, it is about us. Later, I started photographing in medical history museums. I first saw a picture of the anatomical wax model of a woman with pearls in a guidebook on Vienna. She struck a chord in me. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She seemed to contain all I wanted to say at that moment, about feeling gutted, displayed. Caught as an object of desire and horror at the same time. She also seemed relevant to me in terms of medical history, a gaping example of sexism in medicine. The perversity of those pearls, that long blond hair. I went on with this work even though it is gory and depressing because the images seem to reveal so much. I was shocked when I came across the bearded woman’s head. I couldn’t believe that here was this woman’s head, stuffed and mounted, in a jar. The bell jar was just sitting on a file cabinet in a corner of the room, in an obscure museum in Paris, a place completely closed to the general public (it is part of the School of Medicine at the University of Paris). Her head was placed in the jar to be looked at. But it’s not just her head that I see. I see the bell jar, the specimen identification card, the carved wooden pedestal. I see a set of implied circumstances. Who was in charge? Who put this woman’s head in a jar and called it science? I am moved by her, anxious to know more about her life, the quality of her life. But, these pictures don’t tell us all that much about her. You cannot see her or know her by seeing only her severed head. These pictures are about our culture, about an institutional obsession with difference. Those anatomical models were made in the seventeenth century, and that woman was put under the bell jar in the late nineteenth century, but I see these images as contemporary, because the system which put her head in a bell jar is still in place. The world just hasn’t changed that much.

— Zoe Leonard interviewed by Laura Cottingham, JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART