An un-natural history : paradox, wonder and The Glass Flowers

This research project concerns itself with the human desire for control, order and perfection through an investigation of our attempts to control nature. The museum case acts as a metaphor for this attempt to organise the natural world in a logical and systematised fashion. In my artwork I aim both to present and to challenge this imposition of order and control through my interpretation of the Glass Flower display at the Harvard Natural History Museum, formally known as the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants. This examination of the Glass Flowers and their visual representation has been informed and challenged by an understanding of their paradoxical and enigmatic position between science and art, nature and culture. In my artwork this ambivalence about the Flowers as objects of scientific certainty, and about the museum as a site of control, is expressed as an increasing tension between representation and abstraction, the precise rendition of form and the visibility of the medium of oil paint. Together with the exegesis this project explores issues of museology and the nature of collected and displayed objects, particularly these Glass Flowers which were purpose-made for the museum. My visual work responds to the museum environment in ways which both embrace its aesthetic and question its attitudes to nature. In doing so, it reflects the paradoxical nature of the Flowers and the nature of seeing itself, creating a visual world in which ambiguities of scale, location and even subject undermine our certainty of what we see, creating a magical space out of the ordered world of the museum.Master of Art