These sculptures recall a museum display case or aquarium in which is displayed strange marine life collected by a ship from Australia's past - such as the Geelvink and the Durande (which are real ships) - with an internal museum label identifying the 'creature' inside, a brief description and provenance. The label contents are made up - as are the names although they link back to the animal that inspired the piece inside. These are the sort of things one might find when searching through the back rooms of the Natural History Museum, the Smithsonian or some Gothic pile.
They form part of a cabinet of curiosities – an encyclopaedic collection of objects whose categorical boundaries are yet to be defined. These, often faked, objects belong to the world of natural history, geology, ethnography and relics, works of art and antiquities. Kunstkammer are microcosms of the 'theatre of the world', of recollections and of memory. A 'memory theatre' which addresses the nexus of science, industry, society, time and place and symbolically conveys the artist's control of the world through its indoor, microcosmic reproduction of that world.
These works are largely directly related to vintage science and scientific discoveries, the melding of old scientific instrumentation and museum display cases with biological artefacts represented in abstract steel. Mixed-in with these cases and Kunstkammer relics are bubble-wrapped objects awaiting unpacking and display, or maybe wrapped ready for removal to another space.
Some pieces inhabit a museum display case or aquarium – unknown life-forms collected by an exploratory or scientific research vessel from the distant past, its taxonomy alluding to the nature of the thing inside and the remarkable journey made by the (real) ship. These are the sort of things one might still find when searching through the cellars and warehouses of a museum or an old industrial site where they might have been left when the building was abandoned, and bring us face-to-face with a now lost world of science and discovery.
Others are associated with vintage scientific instrumentation from the early part of the last century – for example, encrusting curious brass balances in rebuilt mahogany cabinets (see related web page). Explicitly creating a microcosmic theatre of the world through symbiotically combining intact industrial and scientific objects and equipment with fabricated biota – strange constructs made through the fabrication and manipulation of objects and materials. An evolving inhabitation of the objects and equipment. A displayed specimen of a strange amalgamation of the natural with the man-made. The metallic remains of some biota resting on parts of vintage scientific instrumentation, in association with a found natural object (see related web page). A 'take' on the sort of faked 'natural artefacts' made famous by the original Kunstkammer.
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