Max Hooper Schneider

Max Hooper Schneider is an artist specialising in biological and mineral matters and their associated phenomena. Especially novel engagements of materials that glow e.g. bioluminescence, phosphorescence, photoluminescence and those related that blur the natural and the artifactual, the living and the dead.

He initiated the glowing Beluga Whale Skeleton project in the autumn of 2012. The precursory work involving several years of sculptural and material experimentation undertaken first at Harvard University and thereafter in multiple studio settings, led to a craving to create and show to the public a powerful and primogenal experience in the animist phenomena of "glow" that is photo excitation. After the decision was made to realise this experience by creating a glowing whale skeleton, they had to find the mold of a small whale skeleton and than cast a chemically ornate, mutant whale form using a resin that would be able to generate the strongest glowing phosphorescent pigments available.

The mold of the Beluga whale was found at an anatomical replica factory in the California desert. The mold originally came from a 20 year old, 13 foot female specimen retrieved in western Greenland by the San Diego Museum of Natural History. Schneider rented the mold and started to invest in the rare and expensive materials he used to create the phosphorescent, glow-in-the-dark resin that would fill the silicon voids and osteoplastic galleries of the hundred over molds that make up the whale skeleton. The total volume is estimated to be about 1300 oz.