joondakammer: a cabinet of curiosity for the City of Joondalup

Joondakammer was commissioned for the City of Joondalup Art Collection. It consists of materials collected over 12 months from the parks, wetlands and beaches of the city and from donations from local residents and supporters of the local environment. Shelves and drawers showcase the ecologically important, strange and wonderful worlds that surround us. It also contains a Xylotheque—a ‘library’ of wood—so a museum inside a museum, slow-moving footage on the eco-TV and the infrequent sounds of animals calling on a 5.75 day-long sound loop.

Extract from interview with the artist:

One of the reasons that I set out to make the cabinet is so that people who live in the City of Joondalup have access to the wonder around them. That’s one of the things that cabinets of curiosity were originally said to do. In German they were called wunderkammer, or chamber of wonders. However, museums have their problems as well—particularly if they become places where the dominant culture ‘catalogues’ and ‘hoards’. The western culture of museums lost a lot of its sense of wonder when the very institutions became instruments of colonisation. Fundamental to this project was coming to terms with this history and that process involved consulting (as a settler person) with the Indigenous reference group—at the very least to get a sense of what shouldn’t go into the cabinet. Whilst any cultural misinterpretations are mine, I hope that this artwork is taken as a modest gesture towards alternative futures.

As well as being about wonder and place, Joondakammer is about time, and the ‘thusness’ of nature. Is it possible to make a ‘museum’ that also engages with the present/future? What would an audience think of the cabinet in fifty or one hundred years’ time? Will it just be a sarcophagus of extinctions? How might the cabinet counteract that passivity? The rocks, coral and soil make us think about deeper times (some held in Indigenous cultural memory). The time of the present/future is also folded in through the inescapable presence of plastic (I even found a plastic shark in Lake Joondalup). There is text engraved into the cabinet where I have tried to make the urgency of ecological actions visible—as a message to the future.