The private collection of Renaissance naturalist Ole Worm is re-created by artist Rosamond Purcell in a traveling exhibit she calls “Worm’s Room”
Artist and photographer Rosamond Purcell became fascinated with the famous illustration of Renaissance physician Ole Worm’s natural history collection which he housed in a Wunderkammer or “Wonder-Room.” Worm’s room is known today only through this 1655 engraving. These "wonder rooms" were private collections whose specimens, according to Purcell, “were arranged in a manner that appeared scientific but was in fact primarily theatrical.”
As her fascination with the engraving of Worm's collection grew, Purcell became increasingly determined to re-create his wonder-room. She notes her impatience with modern taxonomic systems "which fail to group specimens aesthetically and intellectually in such a way as to invite viewers to participate in the enjoyable act of interpretation." "Part of the pleasure of viewing older collections," she writes in the afterword to her book Finders, Keepers, "comes from not knowing exactly what to expect."
Purcell’s well-documented artistic endeavors with junk grew into an exhibit of her own studio’s contents at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in California. She convinced the museum to help her also re-create the contents of Worm’s collection. For the planned exhibit, called “Two Rooms,” Purcell studied the antique etching and either borrowed from curators around the country or fabricated the artifacts in order to construct a full-size replication of "Worm's Room," as she calls it. Her exhibition of the wonder-room has now been to several museums around the country.
