Karin Findeis samples the Macleay Museum

May, 2008

samples (A Taxonomy of Objects), an exhibition by Karin Findeis, a lecturer in Jewellery and Object at SCA, will be on display at the University of Sydney’s Macleay Museum until 12 June. The exhibition celebrates Findeis passion for collecting and explores the role of the museum as a place where objects of significance are displayed.

Using contemporary jewellery as an interpreter of culture, Findeis uses its relationship to the body as a link to the personal, or domestic, environment. In samples she has created five parallel displays; miracles; entomoids; amalgama; found; and inventorium. Her collections offer different perspectives of an indistinct world where for a short time boundaries are blurred. They are an investigation into the meaning of objects and images, the relationship between fact and fiction and the ‘writing’ of histories: private and public.

miracles explores the seemingly insignificant and reclassifies them as gently remarkable. These are quiet oddities that we pass unseeing each day until the moment our attention is caught. They may be remnants of nature, evidence of development or markings of daily life. They become special through positioning and ordering; entomoids draws directly on the moth collection of the Macleay Museum. Prompted by their subtle differences, particularly in colour, entomoids is also a ‘pinned’ collection that mimics the formality of classification; amalgama focuses on how our physical surroundings influence our perceptions of the world. This collection addresses the contradictions between what one knows and what one expects. These objects are amalgamations of familiar things that have been known in a different time or place. They are the possessions of the traveller, explorer, transient;found seeks to reinstate lost jewellery into a collection of ‘visible’ objects. When missing, our lost valuables are physically absent from us however they still exist in their invisibility, persistently in the story of their loss. Here, actual lost jewels have been brought to light again to be united intoa family, to celebrate their shared characteristic of invisibility; inventorium serves as a link between the historical and the contemporary, between inspiration and reality. Using the framework of the object as specimen, and therefore as an example of a broader field, individual items of personal collection become ‘frozen’ in time and space, in the environment of the museum.

Sunday Arts (ABC1) will be presenting a segment about Findeis exhibition samples on Sunday 1 June.

Image: Stipes limbus (holotype), 2008
Brooch. Silver, paint.
Photo: Barry Langrishe