Making Unexpected Connections

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Media release

Monday 12 December 2016

Making Unexpected Connections

The Turnbull Gallery is being transformed into a Victorian cabinet of curiosities for a new exhibition opening today, Monday 12 December.

Unexpected Connections takes a fresh look at the multilayered world of 19th century polymath William Colenso and his contemporaries.

Whether seated in vintage leather chairs or viewing items displayed in period furniture, visitors are encouraged to reassemble objects and generate new stories through chance encounters with over sixty objects from public and private collections from around New Zealand.

Colenso’s microscope and printer’s composing stick join taxidermy and herbarium specimens to suggest new ways of understanding the complexities of the people, places, and things that constitute the Victorian republic of letters.

A highlight of the exhibition is a digital artwork that creates evocative multi-layered images from a range of items from DigitalNZ.

Guest curator and Marsden project director Dr Sydney J Shep says “the installation probes how serendipity – a key feature of the historian’s toolkit – provides opportunities to rethink biography in the digital age as a complex system of meshworks, lifegrids, and palimpsests.”

The exhibition was coordinated in conjunction with an international symposium hosted by Victoria University of Wellington’s Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies and the Alexander Turnbull Library, in association with Wai-te-ata Press, the Colenso Society, and the Marsden Fund, Royal Society of New Zealand.

The New Zealand Polymath: Colenso and his contemporaries presented work on Thomas Kirk, Henry Honor, F.E.Maning, Thomas Cheeseman, Josephine Gordon Rich, William Henry Skinner, Emily Cumming Harris, George Rusden, Miss Jelly and Augustus Hamilton, WW Smith, Julius von Haast, Suzanne Aubert and Elsdon Best. Discussions of Māori oral tradition and traditional ecological knowledge joined reflections on Bishop John Colenso, William Colenso’s type cases, his scientific achievements, his rehabilitation as a cleric, his relationships in the Victorian republic of letters, a look at some of his surviving ephemera.

Peter Wells spoke on Colenso’s mission house as a lost bicultural treasure.

Public programmes associated with the exhibition will commence in January and include talks on vanished or vanishing arts and sciences such as conchology, phrenology, phonography, and taxidermy.

Unexpected Connections runs until 3 March 2017.

Ends

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