Rosamond Purcell

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Very Like a Whale

The collector hovers over the collection.
The collection closes like a shell around the collector.
It is a closed system.
Or two.

One cannot easily determine what secret rules drive certain collections.

As a collector myself I have had offerings proffered up by friends and family that are touching in sentiment but often, regrettably, off-center from the bulls-eye of longing.

In 2003 I wrote the book Owls Head: On the Nature of Lost Things. It is a biography of Mr. William Buckminster, owner of a large derelict antique and scrap metal business. It is also an extended description of this customer’s attraction to these mostly ruined objects.

For several decades I have photographed natural and manmade subjects, scrutinizing them for what they are—and closely. Whether I manage to deliver up true documents is quite another story. I try to capture what is there, but am told I think too much (whatever that means). I identify with what the critic Helen Vendler wrote of the poet Wallace Stevens, “the poetry of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact.”

I have often relied on artifacts that will go to work for me. Buckminster’s ruined books, metal fragments—precious for their patina and broken meaning—give me ideas. I am attracted over and over to the properties of glass. I first wrestled with the annoying glare that glanced off venerable zoological jars of snakes, monkeys or bats. I worked to make the animals in their clouded zones clearer in the photographs than they were, in fact, in the jars of fluids. I used a polarizing filter, and I looked at the creatures fixedly. To render them “clearer” in the photographs did make them seem stranger in the end, but not, as I had supposed, more ‘real”.

According to Borges (this story, by now, a good—and therefore valuable—cliché) a famous list from an old Chinese encyclopedia (here partially cited) divides animals into “those (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) sucking pigs, (d) sirens, (e) stray dogs, (f) frenzied (g) innumerable, (h) drawn with a fine camel hair brush, and (i) those that, from a long way off, look like flies.”

Everything in this list could be real but the classification, the group as a whole, of course, is fantastic. Flesh, pen and ink, or looking like flies, animals appear all over the place, forever jumping the fence.

I take a free ride on Borges’ list for a reason. There is something splendid about things that look like other things. One thing often refers to more than one world; it can break down boundaries between the organic and the inert, the monster and the marvel. I marvel at polished mineral that looks like a city or a volcano or the wing of a bird, a rock like a frog or shoe, a fern like a sheep. This way of crossover thinking was familiar to people in the sixteenth or seventeen century when matters of science, religion and philosophy were interconnected: stars and owls and divine powers. The language in Shakespeare’s plays evokes these systems of belief.

The prints on display at Big Town Gallery, come from the book “Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare” (W.W.Norton, fall 2010). Each of these images is accompanied by lines from Shakespeare, from both the famous and less well known plays, ferreted out of all the thousands of dramatic possibilities by Michael Witmore, co-author of this book.

At the beginning of this project—which I took on as a dare—not knowing how it was to be done—I searched for months to find a strategy for the photographs. I had nothing on hand. Finally, in a local antique shop, I found a few dingy ‘mercury glass’ jars and noticed how the outer glass and inner oxidized mirrors turned every reflection into a wide-angle anamorphic image. I set the jars in a field in northern New Hampshire where elusive forms rose up—chimeras that shaped themselves into landscapes and scenes: men from grass and beasts from trees—and, eventually, Ophelia, Rumour, Richard III, Field of the Cloth of Gold. I went fishing in an all-new alchemical soup, building up a kind of a collection, forged from shapes that looked like other shapes, and rising from the depths of jars originally used to hold fabric dyes in a factory long ago, in North Carolina.

Hamlet : Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel
Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet : Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet : Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale.

Hamlet Act III, scene ii

Rosamond Purcell
July, 2010