Wunderkammer: Steller’s Curse

The dichotomy between the science and art worldviews provides a gateway through which both artists and scientists can explore a personal and collective relationship with the world via the platform of the archive. Scientists (like me) and artists (like me) can leverage scientific collections—fossil compendia, field notebooks, nautical logs, herbaria sheets, genetic data and imagery, or the myriad other objects collected or created during scientific activities and expeditions—and archives of these collections can be viewed simultaneously as repositories of knowledge, ways to satisfy the desire for order and control, transmitters of wonder, and mirrors of ourselves, of the collector, and of culture and society. For the past thirty years, I have participated in scientific expeditions to treeless, windswept islands of Alaska’s Aleutian Island Archipelago and allied island groups. Landfall was made on a number of those same islands during the ill-fated 1741 Second Kamchatkan Expedition. This experience has provided me an unparalleled opportunity to place imagery emerging from archives generated via my own lived experience straddling the 20th and 21st centuries within the context of archived records and the lived experience of 18th century scientific explorers. My research tracks archives of the voyage of the packet boat, St. Peter, which carried Captain Commander Bering’s crew from Kamchatka to southeast Alaska and, after many trials, including sickness and death of the Commander, back to Kamchatka, during 1741-1742. My own field research activities and archives—mostly materials from botanical expeditions conducted between 1988 and 2019—span much of that 18th century track, and I use in my art-making those archived science-made materials to explore the impact of scientific expeditions and subsequent colonial expansion on the species and indigenous people that occupied and continue to occupy these remote treeless islands. In an example of ArtScience, I leverage insight emerging from art-making, science-making and my own lived experience to formulate and test a new hypothesis to solve a mystery that has puzzled nine generations of biologists exploring these harsh but beautiful geographies: the species identity of an unknown animal called Steller’s sea monkey.