Wunderkammern have been described as "a microcosm or theatre of the world"* - an encyclopedic collection of objects whose categorical boundaries were yet to be defined. First assembled in private by the architects of the Renaissance, slowly evolved into the great public museums of natural history, science and anthropology.
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| An early 18th-century GermanSchrank with a traditional display of corals (Naturkundenmuseum Berlin) Image: LoKiLeCh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Berlin_Naturkundemuseum_Korallen.jpg |
Thankfully, many of the world's greatest Wunderkammer survive to this day. Happy hours spent sketching rongorongo in Peter the Great's spectacular Кунсткамера (Kunstkamera); creeping myself out by the shrunken heads in the Pitt Rivers Museum; and fossicking around amongst Sir John Soane's dusty plunder have all helped to mould my magpie instinct and inspire wonder in worlds I will never see.
This blog is my very own Wunderkammer; an ever-expanding cabinet where I can showcase some of the weird and wonderful things that make this world such an extraordinary place to live. Images, sounds, stories...if it can be digitised it can be displayed.
At some stage, I'd like to dig out some of my childhood hoardings; the pressed flowers and postcards; the skulls and stones and birds' nests and bottles that entertained me for many years and which, I hope, are still languishing like a (slightly unwelcome) Wunderkammer in my mum's attic!
But I will also be unashamedly plundering the world wide web. Whereas the expeditions of our ancestors were confined by time and money and the very limits of the known world, the web is an almost boundless resource for curators of contemporary Wunderkammern.
May the fossicking commence!
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