top of page

Cabinet of Curiosities

I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.

cabinet of curiosity.jpg

This piece was originally to be part of my Degree Show but now has become a stand alone work. It was made during the coronavirus epidemic. While I was ill with the virus I discovered I had forgotten collections which I could play with and make objects with.

It is a Cabinet of Curiosities in which the four shelves (including the base) are covered with small objects mostly made with shells and other objects from beaches in different parts of the world.  Alongside the natural objects there are nuts and bolts and to almost all the objects I have added wires and metallic threads.  Some of these threads drip almost like water, over the edges of the shelves.

Sketch%201%20cofc%20better_edited.png
half%20shell%20black%20wire_edited.jpg

There is an autobiographical element to the piece.  The furniture is late Victorian or early Edwardian but I first set eyes on it as a young child in the 1950’s when visiting an elderly relative, outside Bradford. Adding authenticity there is a label on the back showing that it was at some point in the hands of W & J Williams Ltd. Bradford, Removals and Storage Est.1870.   The cabinet normally stands, perhaps was made to do so, on top of a mahogany chest with four drawers, the top one of which opens to reveal a desk.  When that generation were gone the combined piece was transported via various iterations and has lived with me for thirty years or more.

In the times of early Western exploration of the globe seafarers returned with all sorts of natural and cultural objects, which they had bartered or stolen from their owners, or picked up from nature.   The earlier Wunderkammer were a form of showing off what they had found, often presented to their patrons.  Cabinets of Curiosity came later and were part of public displays and exhibitions. Museums such as the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum were built to house these collections, as repositories of the artefacts and a form of public education.

Clearly I have inherited the tradition, not of plundering but of collecting.

But the Cabinet has an air of colonialism and of plunder.  The natural objects reference the roots and origins of climate change, the degradation of the planet, and the exploitation of its peoples. Nuts, bolts and wires reference the Industrial Revolution which was taking place simultaneously and has left its increasingly destructive legacy, however intriguing the Cabinet may be.

cowrie%20black%20wire_edited.jpg
Mark Dion.png
Joseph%20Cornell%202_edited.jpg
Angela Cockayne 2.png

Mark Dion. Thames Dig 

Joseph Cornell. Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery

Angela Cockayne.  Traits which

Constitute Personhood

bottom of page