The Hidden Sex

I have been extremely quiet on this blog since October, when I put my head down and started working my fingers to the bone to get my work ready for my solo exhibition, 'The Hidden Sex', which opened last Thursday at Craft ACT in Canberra. As it was the first exhibition for the year, it was a crowded opening, so thanks to all of you who braved the heat to come and see the work. The exhibition is on until 16 March 2019, and I will be giving a floor talk at 12pm sharp on International Women's Day, 8th March.

'Collecting Ladies I-III' series, 2018-9
Watercolour, marine algae on Arches 300gsm

'The Hidden Sex' is an exhibition that was inspired by my 2016 arts residency at the National Museum of Australia. My original project was to look at their botanical holdings but I quickly became inspired (obsessed!) by their two unprovenanced seaweed albums.  I have posted about these previously so will not go through my findings again here. The exhibition concept was to highlight the  invisibility of women in both society and science in the 19th century. Women were not allowed to attend university, and were hardly ever acknowledged for their contribution to our knowledge of our Australian flora.  All the kudos usually went to men, such as Government Botanist, Ferdinand von Mueller; William Henry Harvey, the great Irish phycologist; Joseph Hooker, of Kew; and Carl Agardh of Sweden.  However, not many know that Mueller conscripted over 225 women and children to collect for him, and some of these women sent their collections directly overseas to other scientists.  Hence the collections by some of our most noted women collectors, such as Jessie Hussey of Encounter Bay, SA; Louisa Ann Meredith, from Orford in Tasmania, and others are also in overseas herbaria.

'From Land and Sea: Rhodospermae, Melanospermae & Chlorospermae'
Three pairs of vintage kid leather gloves, embroidered with silk

Thinking about women collecting algae and vascular plants in challenging conditions wearing their heavy garments, skirts, boots and gloves inspired me to embroider some vintage leather gloves myself. Gloves were made in supple yet tight-fitting leather so that they could mould the hand into the proscribed shape - dainty, with long tapering fingers; not flaccid yet not too muscular. They also kept the skin unblemished from the sun. Indeed, I had trouble finding a 'glove model' for my photo shoot, as even the largest glove would not fit today's narrow hand! These gloves could not get wet, so there is a paradox between the gloves and the act of collecting. The three sets of gloves represent the three classes of seaweed, but the scientific name for them has altered slightly.  I have chosen to use the classifications instigated by Harvey in the 19th century - Rhodospermae (red); Chlorospermae (green) and Melanospermae (brown).

Women of the 19th century had proscribed pastimes to help them while away the hours - botanical painting and collection, needlework, music and languages. In the mid 19th century, a craze for collecting seaweed was at its height, having taken over from fern collecting, or pteridomania.  Botanical collections were pressed in special albums, on cards and in books, and became the subject of watercolours and dioramas. The series 'Collecting Ladies' references the etiquette of dress (handkerchiefs and gloves!) and the pastimes of lace-making, embroidery and botanical collecting.

Installation view, The Hidden Sex, Julie Ryder.

On the left of the installation photo are a series of large cyanotypes, made with seaweed I have collected on my travels.  The cyanotype process was the first photographic process invented by Sir John Herschel, but it was pioneered by Anna Atkins in the 19th century, who used this new technique to produce handmade volumes of photographs of British Seaweed that she had collected. The New York Public Library are currently holding an exhibition of these images from the two editions they have acquired, but they are only on for another week. My work references the life-sized work made by Anna, but I have enlarged them to make a bolder statement.

'Submerged' 2018-9, Julie Ryder
Vintage handkerchiefs, cyanotype, seaweed

In 'Submerged', a series of 42 vintage handkerchiefs, I have used the cyanotype process again to reference women's work.  The title refers to both the seaweed being submerged beneath the waves as well as the plight of women in academia and society.

My interest in Victorian Glass Microscope slides has also been described in previous posts, but for this exhibition I had always wanted to produce a series that contained real seaweed and referenced the lace making done by women that appeared on handkerchiefs and clothing. 

'Flowers of the Sea, I-VI', 2019
Glass, seaweed, hand engraving.

Each of the six large (25x70cm) glass microscope slides have been engraved with the place of the collection (Orford, Encounter Bay, Ballinskelligs, Frank's Beach, Macmaster's Beach and Bicheno). Some of these related directly to our past women seaweed collectors, whilst others are favourite places that have personal resonance with my seaweed collection obsession. I will show some details in a later post.

Lastly, as an avid collector of anything that the waves throw up, I have made a large wall installation 'Hortus conclusus' (which literally means hidden or secret or walled garden}.  Made entirely from cuttlebones, these have been collected over a period of years and reference the aggressive passion for collecting multiples of everything by scientists and amateur scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries - even to the detriment of the species, and many species did go extinct, as did many ferns and other botanicals.

'Hortus conclusus' 2019 Julie Ryder
Cuttlebone, carving.

In my collection there are two 'types' of cuttlebones that can be found - smooth ones, and furrowed ones, which are very labial in appearance.  These are not known to be 'male' and 'female' types, in fact conversations with marine biologists have not shed any light as to why there are two sorts. As they are NOT seaweeds I was wondering whether they belonged in the exhibition at all, despite my initial intuition and strong intention that they should be.  Whilst researching I came across an unusual feature of the Australian cuttlefish that not many people know about that clinched it's addition to the exhibition.  During mating times, once a year, all the cuttlefish gather en masse in Whyalla, SA, for an orgy.  Well, not really an orgy, because males only mate once, and then they die.  As there are more males than females, competition to hand her their 'sperm sac' (yes literally, with their tentacles!) is fierce, with the larger, more dominant males guarding the females from other weaker males.  However, these 'inferior' males have come up with a unique and very sneaky strategy to sidle up to the females in order to hand over their genes.  They camouflage themselves as females, even to the point of having a fake egg sac, so that they can mingle with them and avoid fighting with the stronger male. Ingenious. Hidden Sex..... 

There is an amazing podcast out at the moment which gives further insight into this gender swapping hosted by Benjamin Law, called Look at Me.  Click here , and listen to the end where a very poignant story is told by underwater photographer, PT Hirschfield (IG: @pinktankscuba)

I do hope you will get to see my exhibition at Craft and if you are on Instagram, you can follow my whole journey with the making of work for the exhibition @julierydertextiles

I love hearing your comments, critiques and thoughts about my work, so please don't be shy! And if you have enjoyed this post, or my work, please pass on my blog and Instagram details to others 💚

Cheers

Julie

Access Visit to the NMA

Access visit to the NMA at Mitchell. Myself, Dr Christine Cargill (ANBG)
Tania Riviere and Catriona Donnelly from the NMA.
Photo: Jason McCarthy, NMA

 On Monday, Catriona and I had organised an access visit to the NMA repository in Mitchell to view the two Seaweed collections I have been blogging (and raving about) since I started my residency here at the NMA in July. I invited Dr Christine Cargill, Curator of Cryptogams at the ANBG and my long time scientific collaborator,  to also come and view the albums so that she could give us her professional opinion on the cryptogams that had been collected in both albums.  These included ferns and mosses collected in both Tasmania in 1836 (Port Arthur Seaweed Collection) and Drouin and Ferntree Gully in 1882 (Port Phillip Seaweed collection).


Because of the extreme fragility of the two albums - both in terms of plant matter and the paper of the books - we could only view the albums under the supervision of Tania Riviere, Conservator with the NMA. Each book was housed within its own custom made cardboard box, and then placed within an archival box for storage.  When they were bought out for viewing they were placed on a large, bean-bag type of pillow that supported the spine of each book as Tania turned the pages for us with gloved hands. The bags were moved and repositioned as the weight of the book changed during the viewing.


Christine was able to get quite close to the pages of cryptogams and identified that amongst them were some examples of hornworts, liverworts and lichens as well as mosses, ferns and lycopods.

Christine getting up close and personal with her eye-piece
Photo: Jason McCarthy, NMA

Christine finds a hornwort hiding amongst the mosses....
Photo: Jason McCarthy, NMA

It was such an interesting and informative visit, because each of us had our own inputs and insights into various aspects of the collection. Tanya made some very interesting observations about the condition of the Port Phillip album, how it had been repaired as well as  other modifications that had been made to it throughout its lifetime. I had been studying both albums for weeks via their high res images on the NMA database and I had already documented the contents of each page, so I knew what I wanted to look at and investigate further once I had access to the real albums. It was also the first time that Catriona had viewed the books first-hand and we were both surprised at the physical dimensions of each book.  For some reason, I expected the Port Arthur album to be small, when in reality it was about scrapbook or ledger size. The Port Phillip album was much thicker than I imagined and the discrepancies between the elaborately tooled front-cover and the back cover remain a mystery to be investigated. 

Despite the level of detail you can observe from hi-res images, what struck me is that it is the power of the actual object, its physical presence, its colouring, the mustiness of the pages and the beauty and intricacy of the actual plants, their forms, colours and shapes,  that impacted on me the most. It was really a privilege to see these objects and the visit has only made me even more enamoured and determined to find out everything I can about them, and similar botanical collections of the 19th century.

And finally.....at last!! I have had two donations of buckets of seaweed from the north and south coast with which I can start playing! I have been hanging out to get my hands on various types of seaweeds to start exploring the materiality of them, to draw them and to preserve them just like the many women of the 1800's before me.

This week my solo exhibition, 'Chromophilia' opens at Timeless Textiles in Newcastle, so my next post will be from there.

A Tale of Two Cities

National Museum of Australia

For the past three weeks I have been physically located at the National Museum of Australia as part of a research and development grant from the Australia  Council, as mentioned in my previous post. Very broadly, my area of interest is to research the botanical holdings of the NMA with a view to making work that reflects early Australian botanical collections and more specifically the involvement of women as collectors and important contributors to our understanding of Australian botany.

After being trained to use the NMA databases, there are two objects that have initially sparked my interest, that I have started to research further.  These objects are two albums of Seaweed collections made in the 19th century : one from Port Arthur in Tasmania, and the other from the Port Phillip Bay in Victoria. These two albums have been the subject of great interest amongst the People and The Environment (PATE) team, with research initiated by Dr Kirsten Wehner, Head of PATE,  who has written a comprehensive post on the PATE blog here. This article has some lovely images of the Port Phillip album's contents, explains why it was collected for the NMA, and how it is important in the context of social history. Kirsten also goes behind the scenes to show readers how an object is photographed and catalogued for collection. Neither of these albums are on public display - they are quite fragile as you can imagine because they contain real plant specimens, and this could be why there are few left in existence today.

Front page of the Port Phillip Seaweed Album
Photo : George Serras, NMA.

Page of the Port Phillip Seaweed Album
Photo : George Serras, NMA.

The Port Arthur album is completely different from the Port Phillip one, and it is fascinating to see alternative approaches to seaweed collecting.  Although the Port Phillip Album is anonymous with haphazard entries out of chronological order, attempts were made to classify them scientifically and they are mostly identified with a year or place of collection, predominantly from St Kilda and Queens Cliff (now Queenscliff) between the years of 1859 and 1882.


In contrast, the Port Arthur Album has a hand written signature in the front of the book in pencil - "C.Frere", and the cover has a blue printed label attached with the text 'Seaweeds/and Mosses/collected at Port Arthur Van Diemen's Land/1836. However, each of the 25 pages are filled with dozens of different samples, decoratively adhered to the pages.  There are no collection details - no clue whatsoever as to location, date or specimen type.


So far all my research has been electronic - I have been given permission to access the high res digital photographs of each page of the albums, which has been fantastic because it means I can spend time looking at each entry in close detail before I make an appointment with NMA  to view the albums over at the Mitchell repository. The viewing of these two objects will be subject to supervision with a conservator, due to their fragility, so I will probably identify beforehand which page(s) are important for me to to observe first-hand to limit any damage to the albums.


Last week I also re-visited the Cryptogam Herbarium at the ANBG to go through their phycological collection and exsiccate, so my next post will discuss the differences between collecting for a scientific institution and making a hobby collection; how collecting policies differ between a scientific institution and a museum; and how the collection of  similar objects can be approached in entirely different ways.