Object/Art/Specimen
The Chau Chak Wing Museum brings together the Nicholson, Macleay and University Art collections, creating startling, thought-provoking, and even affecting opportunities to understand and engage with the world.
Our collections span archaeology, art, ethnography, natural history and science. In Object / Art / Specimen, they are presented in a kaleidoscope of themes, reveling in the diversity of the collections and demonstrating their ongoing relevance in an interdisciplinary world.
Six evocative themes explore human experience and methods of understanding the world, from ‘Sex, love, death’, to ‘Chaos, pattern, order’ and ‘Performance, ritual, belief’.
The premise of the exhibition is betrayed by the title. Depending on a person’s perspective, one person’s object is another’s art or specimen in innumerable combinations.
Clockwise from left: Ethel Carrick Fox, Flower market southern France, c. 1926, oil painting, University Art Collection, UA2018.44, Attic white ground lekythos, 425–400BC, Thanatos Painter, Athens, Greece, NM47.20, Model of a dicot leaf, 20th century, SC2017.3, Crystal models, Krantz, Dr Friedrich Ludwig Robert, Germany, Selection of: SC1991.58.1–124
Header image: Thylacinus cynocephalus (Harris, 1808), Tasmanian tiger, skull and lower jaw, Macleay Collections, NHM.1000
Level 3, Power Gallery
Object Matters podcast
Listen to Dr Paul Donnelly discussing three white ground lekythoi featured in the exhibition