The visual arts and sciences have a shared history of creativity and parallel paths of experimentation, goal seeking, and trial and error. Both disciplines employ innovative techniques and novel materials that help their practitioners develop new ideas, discoveries, and visual products. [RE]Imagining Science, a catalogue featuring art and science projects primarily based at Indiana University, highlights distinctive types of collaborations that occur within this genre of contemporary practice.

[RE]Imagining Science

Arts & Photography

Irmscher, Christoph

Purcell, Rosamond

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Indiana University Press

Photographs of animal exhibits from natural history museums show the various textures of nature, and are accompanied by brief discussions of the significance of each display

Illuminations: A Bestiary

Photography & Video

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Most of us collect things, but seldom have entire collections been preserved. A few that did survive have fallen, figuratively, into the clutches of two of America's most innovative minds: photographer Rosamond Wolff Purcell and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. What these collections say about the collectors, and about human beings in general, is the subject of this strangely beautiful and rich compendium. Here are Purcell's wonderfully exotic photographs of teeth and other human artifacts from the collection of Peter the Great; moles, pigs, and dogs from van Heurn's many boxes of perfectly preserved skins; and all manner of preserved life from Rothschild's Birds of Paradise to the fish of Agassiz. Here also is Gould at his best, delighting in the unusual and making connections to our own history and evolution that only the most fertile and whimsical mind could imagine - and that few will be able to resist. This is a book for those with a craving for beauty, knowledge, and a fascination with the unusual.

Finders, Keepers: Treasures and Oddities of Natural History

Gould, Stephen Jay.

W.W.Norton&Company

A photographic journey into the imaginative world of Shakespeare's plays. In this collaborative work, photographer Rosamond Purcell and Shakespeare scholar Michael Witmore explore the transcendent emotion in Shakespeare's work through photographs, pairing the allusive power of images with the subversive effects of Shakespeare's language. The book takes advantage of oblique connections to reveal things that cannot be represented directly on stage. Purcell has pioneered the technique of capturing reflections in antique mercury glass apothecary jars, resulting in haunting images that seem to move with the liquid quickness of ideas. These images are an attempt to capture Shakespeare's expansive imagination in action―what Coleridge called his "myriad-mindedness": they take a visceral journey into the world of his plays. Witmore has paired each photograph with a short passage from Shakespeare's plays with an uncanny sense of the playwright's intent. 72 color illustrations

Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare

Literature & Fiction

Witmore, Michael

Dramas & Plays

The reclusive American artist Aldwyth (born 1935) has labored at some distance from the mainstream art world to produce astonishingly complex and dense collage and assemblage works that recall the fantastical intricacies of Jess, Ed Kienholz Bruce Conner or even Hieronymus Bosch in their diagrammatic, ordered mayhem. In an accompanying essay, Rosamond Purcell describes Aldwyth's work thus: “packed with intricately fashioned episodes, they seem like worlds that lie outside of our world, and infinitely worth exploring.” As records of other worlds, these works manage to simultaneously suggest maps, instruments and ruins. This catalogue, coinciding with the first major retrospective of this under-recognized artist, brings Aldwyth's work to a wider public for the first time.

Aldwyth: Work V./Work N. Collage and Assemblage 1991-2009

Individual Artists

Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston

The beauty of the robin’s egg is not lost on the child who discovers the nest, nor on the collector of nature’s marvels. Such instances of wonder find fitting expression in the photographs of Rosamond Purcell, whose work captures the intricacy of nests and the aesthetic perfection of bird eggs. Mining the ornithological treasures of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, Purcell produces pictures as lovely and various as the artifacts she photographs. The dusky blue egg of an emu becomes a planet. A woodpecker’s nest bears an uncanny resemblance to a wooden shoe. A resourceful rock dove weaves together scrap metal and spent fireworks. A dreamscape of dancing monkeys emerges from the calligraphic markings of a murre egg.
Alongside Purcell’s photographs, Linnea Hall and René Corado offer an engaging history of egg collecting, the provenance of the specimens in the photographs, and the biology, conservation, and ecology of the birds that produced them. They highlight the scientific value that eggs and nest hold for understanding and conserving birds in the wild, as well as the aesthetic charge they carry for us.
How has evolution shaped the egg or directed the design of the nest? How do the photographs convey such infinitesimal and yet momentous happenstance? The objects in Egg &amp; Nest are specimens of natural history, and in Purcell’s renderings, they are also the most natural art.

Egg & Nest

Hall, Linnea S.

Corado, René

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press

What is a monster? Is it a thing with a hairy face, webbed fingers, and green skin? Or is it simply anything we don't understand? An art book for and about the curious, Special Cases explores humanity's age-old obsession with mythical and literal monstrosity in a way that is not for the faint-hearted. Using photographs she has taken at natural history and anatomical museums, models of her own creation, and artwork from numerous private and public collections, celebrated photographer Rosamond W. Purcell delightedly delves into squeamish subjects such as dwarves, giants, conjoined twins, hairy people, albinos, and humans with animal heads. Sure to capture the imagination of artists, historians, and anyone with a taste for the perverse, Special Cases is a clever visual history whose pages and pictures reveal the fiipside of what we call normal.

Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters

Chronicle Books LLC.

This anthology of commissioned writing on subjects as wide-ranging as rock and roll lyrics, movies, science, pornography, curiosity cabinets, jazz and magic offers rich insights into a vast spectrum of ideas. The classic essay form--postulation, argument, exegesis, conclusion--ain't what it used to be. Lately it's too often referred to as what

Conjunctions: 46, Selected Subversions: Essays on the World at Large

Willard, Nancy

Shields, David

HARBISON, Robert

Carson, Anne

Ugrešić, Dubravka

O'Brien, Geoffrey

Martone, Michael

GROSS, KEN

HOWE, FANNY

Moore, Honor

Crowley, John.

Scott, Joanna

JAY, Ricky

Bard College

Books are man-made artifacts designed to convey information. When they are inevitably invaded by forces of nature and decay, they become suggestive of an alternative literary universe. Noted photographer and collage artist Rosamond Purcell has been exploring this universe for the past thirty years, and in this extraordinarily beautiful collection, the first retrospective of her work, her images teach us to read in a new way. Here are two conjoined volumes transformed by a nesting mouse into a heap of disrupted plot and straw; a 19th century French economics text re-interpreted by foraging termites, and many other oddities from a fertile imagination. Bookworm's 125 color reproductions are imaginative evidence of those processes that render literal meaning irrelevant.

Bookworm: The Art of Rosamond Purcell

History & Criticism

Quantuck Lane

A derelict antiques and scrap metal business in Owls Head, Maine, is the setting of this multi-layered word-portrait of its owner, William Buckminster, proprietor of an extraordinary collection of discarded and decaying items, no-longer-functioning remnants of previous lives. Buckminster's world, which includes both his vaunted talents in the local pool halls and his sure knowledge of the seemingly endless number of fascinating objects from his vast supply, are inspiration for Purcell's carefully crafted meditation on collecting and entropy, and the signals both send to those of us willing to pay attention. 34 duotone footnote photographs.

Owls Head: On the Nature of Lost Things

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Books by Purcell, Rosamond