Wunderkammer Flying fish edition, an installation now  showing on the car park wall next to the Waikato Museum, Hamilton.

Fish don’t have wings. Fish don’t have wings? In fact there are about five species of flying fish native to the waters around New Zealand. How amazing that I did choose an Island as my new home where birds can’t fly, but fish can and do.

It shows again: No matter how tight you pack and label your little boxes, there is still space for magic and the world still doesn’t make much more sense

Background: the Wunderkammer concept

The European “Wunderkammer”, or cabinets of curiosity, was born out of the need to explain the marvelous wonders of the world that were streaming into Europe with explorers, seafarers and merchants discovering and measuring the world in the 16^th and 17^th century.

Embalmed new found species and illustrations of unknown plants, animals and cultures from exotic places turned the picture of the world as it was known upside down.

All those places of wondrous treasure where weeks of exhausting and dangerous travel away, so even the rich and famous didn’t often embark on such treacherous endeavours.

So they tried to acquire “universal collections”, containing artifacts divided into “naturalia”, “artificialla”’ and “mirabilia”, displayed in an attempt to categorize the vast amount of information that was sailing in with every ship.

The Wunderkammer owner didn’t bother much with the sorting. Everything new was marvelous and therefore beautiful.

As a small child in Germany I remember visiting a castle somewhere in southern Germany. Some hundred years ago, farmers of the area  found the remains of a unicorn- a horse like upper torso and skull, a horn (nowadays identified as narwhale horn) and, oh miracle-wheels at the rear end. All of these parts accompanied by an “artist impression” of the animal.

I leave you to it.

Kindly sponsored by Creative Communities.