The Collector’s Nature
Robyn Stacey has collections for significant historical and cultural treasuries with physical delicacy and scientific significance, thus why the general public can’t access these collections. Her photographic combinations are subtle yet stunning with enlarged details to show the act of celebration and examination. Stacey uses digital photographic manipulation to represent her collections in a contemporary and noteworthy way, while referencing the exquisites of centuries past.
Robyn Stacey uses specimens housed in three significant botanic and insect collections. Some of the items that she uses are books, skulls, shells and butterflies.
Stacey’s book still life from The Collector’s Nature, which is titled as Leidenmaster I, is a part of the tradition of the Dutch Vanitas and reminds us that knowledge can also be a form of vanity.
The Great and the Good
The photographs from this series are constructed, while referencing artefacts and historical painting, but only using the contemporary production techniques.
Stacey plays with the viewer’s insight by combining the visual languages of the still life painting traditionally and of contemporary art. Artworks that are odd to us, created by materials of museum and analogue techniques, are often assumed of being digital constructs, even though they are not. Used as an example, her Beau Monde series of butterfly and beetle encrusted balls involved specimens being pinned from the insect collection of Macleay onto a black velvet ball.
A photograph from her The Great and the Good series, titled as Mr Macleay’s Fruit and Flora, seems to be digital construct at its first glance due to the baffling array of fruits and flowers, although there is a historical foundation behind the exquisite collection. When Stacey came up with the idea of representing Macleay’s garden with the flowers she saw on a particular day, she decided to get the flowers off a good florist, but realising that no blooms could truly represent the unique ones of Macleay’s garden. Flowers that were cut and fruits that were picked from Vaucluse House were rushed to Stacey’s studio, located in Waterloo. It took five hours to assemble everything; “Flowers were dying one end by the time we got down to the other.” Stacey explained. The process will be repeated again in August to “get the full impact of what his garden would have been like you’ve got to do all the seasons”.
Tall Tales and True
Stacey speaks about the notion of Australia of home and what it means to our national psyche, while showing her interest with the still life tradition. Her transformation of these historic spaces and objects enables the public to not only peek into earlier worlds, but also to think about the hierarchies of taste, culture and knowledge. Being returned to a fictional reality, the objects create a sense that the settings have been left for only a little moment of time and that people are never far away.
The similarities between Marian Drew and Robyn Stacey’s practices are that they both aim to cover the historical and the present, their objects have meaning and creating different senses, and both Australian artists look at the traces of inhabitation.
Stacey’s work from Tall Tales and True, titled as Chatelaine, features a luxurious collection of objects, consisting of Wisteria spilling out of a vase sitting on a carved side table. The objects are from Vaucluse House’s collection that belonged to its owner, Sarah Wentworth. Her convict past didn’t allow entrance easily into high society at that time. We see proof of the attempts of Wentworth to maintain her social position.
CCC Photography 2016 