the fortuitous rencounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella
The cabinet of curiosities - sometimes known as Wunderkammer - were collections of disparate objects, put together by the wealthy and aristocratic as predecessors of museums. At their height in the Renaissance, though continuing today, the Cabinets were often more than just items of furniture: whole rooms could be filled by objects of wonder ("miracles"), things which appealed to the collector simply because of their oddity, collected with little or no care for category or for relative or absolute value.
These collections initially arose from the fact that Renaissance 'science' was simply not developed enough to categorise accurately, thus biological specimens jostle with mineral samples, ethnological artefacts with dubious religious relics.
It was not unknown for objects to be wrongly attributed or described and whole faked histories were sometimes created to explain particularly odd items, though the collections most certainly furthered scientific advances and knowledge, many of them being put together by proto-scientists ("naturalists"), such as John Tradescant.
More recently, the idea was siezed upon by the Surrealists - such as Breton and Duchamp - but it was the post-Surrealist, Joseph Cornell, who made the form his own, creating boxed objects from found junk which have an elegance and poetry, imbuing the objects with a metaphysical calm which sets them apart from much of the Surrealist posturing. Even Damien Hirst's installations and taxidermy, and the snake-oil salesman's pseudo-medical posturing of Gunther von Hagens owe much to this genre.
My own love of the Cabinet of Curiosities has been with me since I can remember. I used to have a battered old biscuit tin, in which I kept small toys, shells, a large peach pit, a button shaped like a ladybird, a fish made from thin, stamped metal, and more: I can only have been about five or six. My house is now full of toys, bits of metal, strange stones, stuffed animals, pictures ripped from magazines, wooden boxes, a huge ebony elephant, stags' horns, feathers, magnets, musical boxes, glass slides...
I seem to have been predisposed to hide small, odd objects inside battered metal containers.
This body of work stems from a visit to the Pitt-Rivers museum in Oxford. This is quite my favourite museum in the UK, followed closely by Brighton's bizarre and wonderful Booth Museum. Both of these museums were private collections which were donated to the public. The Pitt-Rivers museum has a somewhat random approach to collecting and all the objects are hand-labelled, often rather illegibly. In order to view many of the objects, it is necessary to open unlabelled (or vaguely labelled, eg: "Items for smoking") drawers and peer into them with a dim, hand-held torch, where you might discover a wax figurine, a bullock's heart stuck with nails or a piece of fabric made from humming-bird feathers.
One important aspect of the original cabinets can be summed up thus (my emphasis):
Symetry also established itself as the ruling aesthetic governing the settings in which objects were enshrined; for the cabinet of curiosities was nothing more nor less than a sequence of containters holding within them yet more containers in diminishing order of size, in the ceaseless quest for the allusive essence of a particular realm of knowledge.
Each piece of my own work in the series is designed to hide a curiosity for the viewer/wearer to discover/reveal, while the cases for the objects - the "cabinets" - are objects which themselves provoke curiosity. The concealed object may be of little or no monetary value but is of great curiosity value. In addition, each piece suggests narrative derived from questions about the concealed object: "What is it?", "Where did it come from?", "Why does the maker/wearer think that this is an object worthy of displaying?". While there is no intention to create any metaphysical effect, the viewer/wearer will tend to lend it resonances from their own history and, as such, the pieces seem nostalgic.
Cabinets of Curiosities, Patrick Mauries, pub. Thames & Hudson, 2002. ISBN: 0500510911
The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century Europe, Oliver Impey & A.C. MacGregor (Ed.), pub. House of Stratus, 2001. ISBN: 1842321323
Maker Wearer Viewer, Jack Cunningham, pub. Glasgow School of Art, 2005.
Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay Eterniday, Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Walter Hopps, Richard Vine, Robert Lehrman, pub. Thames & Hudson, 2003. ISBN: 0500976287
The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford
The Pitt-Rivers Museum on Wikipedia
Cabinets of Curiosities on Wikipedia