Wunderkammer
Wunderkammer is an ongoing set of collections that visually echo the multifaceted nature of seventeenth and eighteenth-century collecting culture. A passion that drove the ambition of the elite "gentleman amateur" seeking to exemplify learning and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and in its broadest sense. With the transformation of these private collections into public museum institutions there came not only changes in ownership, but also fundamental shifts in how objects were organised, interpreted, and made accessible. With early public museums typically maintaining the encyclopedic approach characteristic of such collectors' cabinets, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries increasing specialisation in collecting practices saw general cabinets giving way to focused collections organised according to emerging disciplinary boundaries. Natural history assemblages began to separate into distinct botanical, zoological, and geological collections, while antiquities were increasingly classified according to cultural origin rather than material or function.
In these 30cms x 30cms works, each compartment contains a fragment from my collections and previous artworks, mounted against a background of text and images taken from the German Myers Encyclopedia (1909). Each 'cabinet' represents one theme or starting point, however when they come together, wider strands of connectivity become apparent. Acting as a personal diary, the work considers how we collect memories, what we choose to preserve, and what we deem valuable in our attempt to understand the world.
The modular work now consists of nine panels, as shown in the first image below. Also shown, as four panels and each single panel.
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