Now Bill has added a fourth series entitled 'Zootorium' to accompany the three previous sets of images we featured: Relics; Head and Imaginary People.

Bill describes himself as a collector of things; random objects and discarded waste salvaged from rubbish dumps and skips. Over time he has formed a personal museum of curios; each discovered treasure carefully labelled and stored, kept in case they might have some future use. And so it was with a box of abandoned plastic toy animals that became the basis for "Zootorium".

Here's some information from Troika Editions about the series:

Taking inspiration from Joni Mitchell's 1970 song "The Big Yellow Taxi" in which she sang about 'putting all the trees in a tree museum and charging everyone a dollar and a half just to see them', Bill took his box of toy animals, a mixture of wild animals, farm animals and domestic pets and created "Zootorium"; a museum of animals.

"Zootorium" is a simple concept; toy animals placed under glass domes and presented on a podium. Through the careful presentation of the isolated toy, removed from its role in a child's game, and the process of photographing each object, Bill transforms the animals into museum relics, granting them an implied greater significance beyond their original childish purpose, and conserving the artefacts for future generations to view.

Bill's primary concern is to explore the idea of the photograph as an object. He recasts his found objects into new fictions and in so doing questions ideas about the limitations of photography and specifically how the line between photography and other art forms, in particular sculpture, is being blurred in contemporary photographic practice.

ZOOTORIUM was launched at the 2012 London Art Fair and is presented in a specially designed art box or as individual plates, available from Troika Editions.

www.billjackson.biz