Word Cloud Wildlife

Kingdom Animalia comprises over 7 million living animal species, each with their own unique story to tell, yet all homogenized into a single classification. Some species are incredibly distinctive while others are more subtly varied, yet all share some amount of broad ideals that have been expressed throughout the art of language.

Although language may be limited, it is also abundant, with several ways to offer expression and identification. Each animal has come to be known by a multitude of titles and has been affixed with a variety of labels within thousands of different languages across the globe. Even the many names of a species can reveal a part of its life story and offer a glimpse of its heritage.

This series strips each animal’s physical form to reveal a cloud of words, amorphous and ambiguous. Lines of text spill across the menagerie, categorizing every fragment of the species’ essence and organizing their features into a limited library of terms, striving to make sense of their complications. These words share a glimpse of each creature’s complex life, its physiology, taxonomy, geography, and ecology, all through the art of etymology.