Curiosities & Natural Artifacts

A wooden cabinet of shallow drawers, a beetle pinned under glass, a globe that still turns. Curiosities and natural artifacts descend from the old cabinet of curiosities: fossils and minerals, insect specimens, globes, scientific instruments. Turtle stones, the septarian concretions whose cracked surface recalls a tortoise shell, sit with fossilized shells some fifty to seventy million years old, petrified wood and Chinese gongshi viewing stones. Butterflies and beetles from Peru, Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Madagascar, among them the jungle nymph Heteropteryx dilatata and blue Morpho butterflies, are mounted under glass.

Terrestrial globes, some illuminated, playing cards, carved skulls, a Tibetan phurba ritual blade and pieces from the Asmat of New Guinea and Arctic peoples add the human side. Stone, bone, glass, paper, tin. Grouped on steel shelving in a study, or alone in a niche, they bring a naturalist’s appetite into the room. A skull has never hurt a bookshelf.