Transforming Everyday Objects
Photographer Rosamond Purcell transforms everyday objects into something extraordinary in her recent exhibit "Eloquent Eggs & Disintegrating Dice"
by Kurt Shaw
What child hasn't gazed in wonder at the world of beauty contained in the tiny shell of a robin's egg?
Visitors to the latest exhibition to open at the Silver Eye Center for Photography will experience that feeling and more with the remarkable "Eloquent Eggs & Disintegrating Dice: Photographs by Rosamond Purcell."
The exhibit features 41 color-saturated photographs by Purcell, a world-renowned Boston artist who has photographed for years in natural history and anatomical collections. It constitutes a debut of her latest body of work, which will be featured in the forthcoming book "Egg & Nest" (Harvard University Press) to be released.
Images in the book, and many of the photographs on display, were captured by the artist from the collections of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology in Camarillo, Calif., which houses the largest egg and nest collection in the world. The foundation also is a research and education institution dedicated to bird conservation.
As visitors to the gallery will see, Purcell uses her camera to transform the everyday ordinary into something extraordinary. She captures the diverse beauty, quirkiness and allure of eggs and the remarkable resourcefulness of birds, focusing on the intricacy of nests and the aesthetic perfection of bird eggs.
The rich colors, lighting and textures make her photographs of eggs, nests and birds look three dimensional, as though the eggs could easily fall out of one of the photographs, as if falling from a nest.
With an overwhelming emphasis on texture and surface, the images range from the dotted lumps and bumps of the Guira Cuckoo eggs in "Guira Cuckoo (Guira guira)" to the smooth and almost candy-coated bright shine of Tinamou eggs in a rough stone container in "Tinamou Eggs."
Purcell explains in "Egg & Nest": "I am searching for the aesthetic and metaphoric ideas inherent in almost every natural history specimen, anywhere, irrespective of its scientific 'significance,' and even of any obvious beauty. Fortunately, the act of pointing up those qualities does not usually obscure the science. How could it?"
Although most of the images are of eggs and nests, the few featuring the birds are quite dramatic.
For example, in "Great Egret, (Ardea alba)," the white wingspan of one wing of an egret is placed in stark contrast against rich black background. And in "Passenger Pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius)," two obviously long-dead and dressed pigeons appear as if each is taking a nap.
Purcell is the author of numerous books of photographs, including three volumes produced in collaboration with prominent American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. More recently, she has published "Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters" (Chronicle, 1997), "Swift as a Shadow" (Mariner, 1999) and "Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck with Ricky Jay" (Quantuck Lane, 2002).
Linda Benedict-Jones, executive director of Silver Eye, has been an admirer of Purcell's work ever since her time at Polaroid in Cambridge, Mass., from 1982 to '93. As curator of the Polaroid Collection from 1989 to '93, she remembers Purcell's early work quite vividly and has remained in contact with the artist ever since.
"She was one of the cutting-edge artists in the 1980s who we often invited to work with the Polaroid 20-by-24 inch camera," Benedict-Jones recalls. "When I was at Polaroid, I worked with her on various projects of hers that we would support at Polaroid and collect for the Polaroid Collection."
Also on view at Silver Eye are six vibrant color photographs of disintegrating dice from sleight-of-hand artist and actor Ricky Jay's collection that were featured in "Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck with Ricky Jay."
For the book, Jay asked Purcell to photograph and commemorate his decaying dice collection before they fractured any further. These dice -- made from celluloid, the first commercially manufactured plastic -- typically remain stable for decades, and then, in a flash, begin to crack, crumble and implode.
Jay explains in the book, "To record the death of my dice, I called Rosamond Purcell, doyenne of decaying objects, photographer of taxidermological specimens, memorist of Wunderkammern. Her studio in Cambridge is bedizened with objets trouves (found objects) in various stages of decomposition: Rescued sheets of discarded metal and weather-beaten books that are transformed -- by design, by vision, by respect -- into objects of great beauty. She has come to know my dice, she has scrutinized them. She has analyzed every nuance of shape and color. She has at once halted their disintegration and catalyzed their resurrection. The dice have never looked better."
These pictures of stacked, crumbling, luminous dice, which are filled with a wonderful sense of light thanks to their translucent, sometimes candy-like, appearance so perfectly captured by Purcell, are yet another example of the way this artist is able to document everyday objects or artifacts and transform them into art.
