AUS DER WUNDERKAMMER
From the Cabinet of Wonders: Matched Containers Accompanied by Specimens in Olive Oil.
Huon Pine, MDF, Precatalysed Lacquer, Specimen Jars.
Symmetry, Crafts Meet Kindred Trades and Professions, curated by Kevin Murray drew ten crafts practitioners together and set them to making works that explored the ground between four categories of crafts practice. They were: Jewellery and Dentistry, Weaving and Journalism, Glass and Jazz, and Woodwork and Surgery. The latter, by virtue of the imagery of cutting, dissecting, repairing, reconstructing etc. had the greater capacity of the four to cause people to grit their teeth.
Not convinced about the validity of the linkages per se, Lueckenhausen identified an interesting tangent - taxidermy, a craft that had played a primary role in the development of the art and science of collecting animal, fish and bird specimens.
The word decoration may be the key to why the surgery/woodcraft analogy appeared at least forced and at most macabre to many viewers and commentators. The saw-bones and wood saw analogy is not difficult to grasp but the decorative display quality inherent in crafts practice is not so readily transferable to human tissue, perhaps particularly post-mortem, and may be where most people prefer to draw the line, leaving them disinclined to pursue the thought any further.
The narrative of the larger pair is of conjoined, identical twins that have been surgically separated. The green represents the site of the cut. They are joined, in the group, by two less well-formed, smaller, Huon Pine creatures preserved in jars. The preserved specimens are conscious representations of fetuses of the same family of creatures. This reference, harking back to the bizarre taxidermy work utilizing human infant body parts of Frederick Ruysch (1638-1731), creates a slightly gruesome grouping with several cross references to various forms of surgical intervention and the storage of biological specimens. The use of the lip form, one of Lueckenhausens signature marks, has probably never taken on as representational, nor as poignant a role in his work as it does here, in the silenced, objectified flesh of the specimen.