Rosamond Purcell, Wunderkammer-keeper and amazing photographer of curiosities and collections, contributed a short piece to McSweeney’s that’s tied to her latest book, Egg & Nest. The marvelous book couples Purcell’s images celebrating the exquisite form and color of eggs with essays about egg collecting, ecology, conservation, and biology. In McSweeney’s, Rosamond comments on the calligraphy-like markings on eggs of the Common Murre.
From McSweeney’s:
The calligraphic effects so pronounced on blackbird eggs may appear over the entire surface of the shell on certain eggs of the Common Murre (above left), dancing and twisting in lines reminiscent of Japanese writing or Chinese brush painting, executed with flourish and grace. In the example below I photographed the circumference of this egg one section at a time. Then, my husband Dennis and I assembled the pieces into a “Mercator” projection (above right).
The effect of stitching together these slices creates a large mural of acrobatic monkeys swinging from vines, a young chimp riding a unicycle, gibbons in free-fall. But then, looking again, a “vine” becomes the outline of the back of a bull, emerging now like an ancient creature from the walls of Lascaux. I begin to think about the connections between avian and human art.
“Eggs And Bacon” essay at McSweeney’s