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Object:
A Unique Specimen of THE WIDOW'S APPEAL.
2005

$1900
+ shipping/handling

Made for the exhibition Sighting the Past: Four contemporary jewellers respond to the Macleay Museum collections.

As I gathered my thoughts for creating work for the Macleay Museum exhibition, I spent much time poring over the bottled specimens that bristle along the walls of the museum, glaring from the cases in their formalin baths. It began to seem fitting and natural that I should do some preserving of my own, in grand Victorian style. So it was that a 'rare specimen' of my older work took the plunge into a mid-19th-century glass jar, not into formalin or formaldehyde, but into a clear polyester resin, to impersonate a liquid.

Sacrificing this piece, done in 1994 in the last stages of my Joseph Cornell emulation, symbolically sealed forever my servitude to the box format, and put my early work in its proper context as an endangered species. The actual process of pickling a piece of jewelry was delightful and hilarious. It also brought to mind conversations I'd had with other jewelers who bemoaned jewelry work sitting behind glass in museum collections, as it flew in the face of jewelry's prime raison d'être. I'd rendered my jewelry altogether captive, and it stares back from its glass prison, a museum display within a museum display, and finally, displayed in a museum.

This is the final work from this exhibition to be offered for sale.