Collector's Paradise
Artist/Maker and role
Joan Ross (Australian, b.1961)
Production date
2019
About this object
Joan Ross was a finalist in the 2021 Archibald Prize, on exhibition at MRAG in 2022. In 2017 Joan Ross was the winner of the 2017 Sulman Prize, after being a finalist in 2018 and 2019.
This is a still from the video, I give you a mountain, by Joan Ross which was inspired by the watercolour paintings created in 1786 by British natural history artist Sarah Stone. One painting in particular depicted the grand interior view of the Holophusicon: The Leverian Museum, a private museum that housed more than 30,000 items collected by Sir Ashton Lever in the late 1700s. The many interconnecting rooms were lined with cabinets filled with specimens of birds and animals, reptiles and fish and objects of curiosity including items from the Pacific collected by Lever’s friend Captain James Cook.
In the video, Joan Ross draws us through the arches and rooms of cabinets and past specimens of headless birds and bell jars of bodyless colonial heads. Much like the journey across her practice in which Ross addresses and re-orients our colonial past, these works critique those who have voraciously collected wildlife specimens, natural materials and ethnographic items across history and the illustrates the destructiveness of this practice to the environment as a consequence.
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