Dunedin Museum of Natural Mystery

New Zealand artist Bruce Mahalski’s dream was always to work in a museum, so finally he just created one for himself. The Dunedin Museum of Natural Mystery is a tiny collection of curios that attempt to show off the beauty of bones and the bizarre.   

Spread over three rooms of an old central city villa, the museum contains a collection of skulls, bones, biological curiosities, ethnological art, and unusual cultural and paranormal artifacts which the artist has collected over a lifetime. There’s also a gallery featuring the artist’s trademark textural bone sculptures and paintings of animals on canvas.

Most of the things in the little museum have been personally picked up or kindly donated by the artist’s friends and colleagues. Nearly everything in the museum has some connection with the world of nature, but there are also a few other interesting things that just seem to fit.

The collection is always changing, as items are added or removed. The artists concocts new displays that he adds to the mix, and also improves and revamps older ones. The museum might be small, but it’s got the skeleton of much greater ambitions.