Tapestry Room: Sampler (His Is the Hand), 2002

I placed my version of Bruegel’s shocked, hapless monkeys on a fabric-covered table in the Tapestry Room, next to a head of Christ and a brass plate depicting the Temptation of Adam and Eve. Elsewhere in the room is a wooden chest with a monkey carved in relief. I was thinking in this sampler about ideas of creation and evolution, particularly in relation to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The quotation, from H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, describes the novel’s eponymous mad scientist, whose cruel experiments were intended to obliterate the distinction between man and beast.

Photograph by Yoav Horesh