Curiosity didn’t kill the cat, it taxidermied it: Typical Relics hits Fredericton
At Saturday’s Esoterica market in Fredericton, between the dark art and the tattoo artists, one table had a mermaid named Darwin.
He isn’t the Disney kind. Darwin is a Fiji mermaid, a sideshow classic in the style P.T. Barnum once exhibited, and he is the favourite piece of Abbie Usher, 23, who runs the traveling museum Typical Relics.
“We’re a traveling museum that shows off the odd and weird stuff and teaches the newer generation about the weird and wonderful world we live in,” Abbie said.
She and her father, Daryl Usher, 50, drove from Cole Harbour, N.S., for the market at the Capital Exhibit Centre, which ran from noon to 5 p.m.
The event featured oddities, dark art, alternative fashion, metaphysical creations, tattoos and crafters.
The table held a taxidermied blonde raccoon, a parrotfish beak and an assortment of sideshow attractions.
There were also artifacts from the 1917 Halifax Explosion, including shrapnel that hit the Dartmouth house where Abbie’s relatives lived, Daryl said.
The collection started small. Abbie has been collecting for four or five years, and Daryl said it began as a form of therapy. She has a condition that causes her to pass out, he said, which made school and conventional jobs hard.
She began photographing her finds for Instagram under the handle Typical Relics and soon met people in the antiques community.
One vendor invited her to set up a table at a show. Daryl said the community has embraced his daughter.
“Because this is something Abbie created, it’s kind of her rehabilitation,” he said. She passes out far less often now.
The pair do two shows a year: Esoterica and the Halifax Oddities & Curiosities Show. They also shop at other vendors’ tables, which keeps the collection growing.
Abbie sells a few items from the end of her table, but her personal pieces stay put.
Daryl said she isn’t “wired” to part with them. For the Ushers, the payoff is the look on a visitor’s face.
“I just love the expressions of people going, ‘Wow, that’s cool,’” Daryl said.
Abbie hopes people leave with something extra.
“I love being able to show people something new and hopefully leaving with some new knowledge,” she said.
At a market full of the strange, the most surprising part may be how welcoming it is.
A mermaid with a family, a raccoon with a story and a museum that fits on a table: all of it traveling, and all of it proof that curiosity is the best souvenir.
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