Task 1 Presentation: Rosamond Purcell, An Art That Nature Makes
Though a relatively unknown artist in the mainstream, a person immersed in the world of photography will only have to glance at a photograph with her signature style to recognize it as a “Rosamond Purcell”(b. 1942). She is a poet as much as she is an artist, a taxonomist as much as she is a magician, given her ability to subvert our understanding of what exactly is in her photographs. Purcell’s collaboration with museum experts, biologists, historians, and literary scholars over the years has led to a fascinating body of work, of natural artifacts that are equally macabre as they are beautiful.
But her Renaissance-woman approach of bringing taxidermies and eggs of extinct birds out of museum drawers and into the daylight is in stark contrast to where she’s found most of her inspiration—a 13-acre derelict junkyard in Owl’s Head, Maine. There she would search in rubble for decaying man-made items that gave the perplexing appearance of something from neither the natural nor manufactured world.
Purcell’s photos invite the viewer to stop asking, “what am I looking at?”, but to instead enjoy the subject for what it is—an enigma.
Book/nest, found object, 1990s, by Rosamond Purcell”The seminal object that I found that was of great importance,is this book nest.It was a nest that had been made by squirrels, or by mice.I have gathered up books in all phases of decay. They run the gamut from gently weather-beaten to hardcore metamorphosed, from faded volumes that can more or less be deciphered, to books that resemble shells and rocks and beyond, to rocks that look like books.” – Rosamond Purcell
Owl’s Head, 2003, by Rosamond Purcell
“In that barn, there was this great mixing up of centuries. It was like going into a maelstrom of historical periods and times.
The barn started to fall apart, but it was slowly, slowly, slowly.
…
There were several times that I went and took pictures of the process of the barn falling.
One day we came and the whole sides were cracked open and everything was pouring down. The whole thing pancaked. I mean, it just fell.” – Rosamond Purcell
Monkeys with Raised Arms,1980s, Rosamond Purcell
“The first photographic experience, it was black and white portraits of monkeys that I had taken out of a drawer in the mammal department at the museum at Harvard, and set up as if they were a crowd of medieval people who had been struck by a meteorite.
Because the cotton eyes and the cotton in the mouth, and their raised arms made them look like a village under some kind of awful attack.” – Rosamond Purcell
Teeth Pulled by Peter the Great,1992, by Rosamond Purcell
“It’s really quite beautiful, it’s arcane, it’s fetishistic, it’s disturbing. It’s her obsession with the box of molars. It’s Peter the Great’s obsession with the molars.
And what does it mean, ultimately? I could say it’s a symbol of the power of the czar. But it goes so far beyond that.” – Errol Morris, film director
Hydrocephalic Child, 1997, by Rosamond Purcell
“It’s from a Dutch collection. It’s like the head of this child is a tulip that is opening into the sun. And that we think of as part of this, kind of, art historical Dutch narrative in and of itself. So that’s something that was a real biological problem.
But, when you see its remains and the way it was catalogued, and the way meaning was reassigned through Rosamond’s photograph, all of a sudden, there’s something certainly melancholy because you know what it is, but has an unmistakable beauty.”- Lisa Melandri, museum director
From Dice, Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck, 2003, by Rosamond Purcell
“These cellulose nitrate dice, the industry standard until middle of the twentieth century, when they were replaced with a less flammable cellulose acetate, typically remains stable for decades. Then, in a flash, they can dramatically decompose. The dice cleave, crumble and then implode.
To record the death of my dice, I called Rosamond Purcell, doyenne of decaying objects, photographer of taxidermalogical specimens, memorist of Wunderkammern.
She has analyzed every nuance of shape and color, she has once halted their disintegration and catalyzed their resurrection. The dice have never looked better.” – Ricky Jay, magician
Bird “wing”, 2009, by Rosamond Purcell
“I like that phrase, ‘Things for what else they are’, which was coined by Minor White, with whom I never studied, but I did meet him and he would like to look at my work and talk to me about my work, but I never formally studied. But I love that idea.
And it is a phrase that has comforted me a lot during the years when I worked in natural history collections because I am apt to go for an image of an animal, or an artifact, that makes it look like something other than what it is.
Here’s a piece of hematite that was taken from a mine in England that is like a bird wing, but it isn’t. It is that mineral.” – Rosamond Purcell
Egg of the Common Murre, 2007-2008 Unrolled, by Rosamond Purcell
“During our trip to photograph all the eggs and nests at the Western foundation in California, the Murre egg, the patterned eggs, that were found on the Arctic coasts caught Rosie’s eye.
And she photographed them in boxes, and photographed the eggs, and at one point said, ‘I wish I could see all of this.’ Because the whole sides were worth seeing.
So, she photographed all sides of it, and I said, ‘Well, I can put that together.’ So we made a panorama of the surround of the egg. Sort of like an Mercator projection of the earth.”- Dennis Purcell, husband of Rosamond
The Wars to Come, 2011, by Rosamond Purcell
“It was what they call ‘a mercury glass bottle’, which has been coated by silver on the inside and was double glazed. I bought one, took it home, and I could see, if you had a small figure outside the bottle that was reflected, and you moved the bottle, the figure would twist and change and double and divide, and all sorts of things.
…
In the Renaissance, they were very interested in anamorphic images, which are twisted, and that have to be resolved with mirrors.
So this was that process in reverse. But they were also interested in the images made by chance. So, there’s this tradition of looking into shapes and trying to see what they mean.”-Rosamond Purcell
Wall, 1990s-ongoing, by Rosamond Purcell
“There were many years, about twenty years, when I was bringing things back from the junk yard regularly.
…
I wanted to bring these things home and set them up, and study them. I would fill up my truck and bring it back, and then incorporate it into what else was here.”-Rosamond Purcell
