Rosamond Purcell, photographer, collage artist, and keeper of an incredible wunderkammer, has a new book out, Bookworm, celebrating the decay of old books and their beauty as raw material in curious collages. (Seen here is Book for Fishes.) Slate is hosting a slide show and essay by Amanda Schaffer about Rosamond’s work over the years. From the essay:
Over the years, Boston artist Rosamond Purcell has photographed goliath beetles and translucent bats culled from the backrooms of natural history museums; a collection of teeth pulled by Peter the Great; moles flayed by naturalist Willem Cornelis van Heurn; and scores of worn and weathered objects, like the termite-eaten book and fish skeleton at right.
Purcell is fixed, in other words, on the state of decay. This bent is evident in her exceptional new volume, Bookworm, which recasts mangled texts as works of art. If Purcell seems always to look backward, she is also strikingly tuned to present-day obsessions–especially our fascination with repurposing. Aggregating curiosities and favorites, both our own and others’, is a prominent feature of sites like del.icio.us, MySpace, and YouTube. The effect is part curation and part spectacle.
Link to slide show, Link to buy Bookworm
UPDATE: At his Boston Globe blog, Joshua Glenn points out that Rosamond’s work appears in the current issue of National Geographic illustrating Carl Zimmer’s article on evolution, titled “A Fin Is A Limb Is A Wing.” Link to photo gallery, Link to article