Tall Ship 2 by Clara Drummond

‘the second scientific revolution’…was a movement that grew out of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment rationalism, but largely transformed it, by bringing a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work. It was driven by a common ideal of intense even reckless, personal commitment to discovery………Romantic science can be dated roughly, and certainly symbolically, between two celebrated voyages of exploration. These were Captain James’s Cook’s first round-the-world expedition aboard the Endeavour, begun in 1768, and Charles Darwin’s Voyage to the Galapagos islands aboard the Beagle, begun in 1831…..The idea of the exploratory voyage, often lonely and perilous, is in one form or another a central and defining metaphor of Romantic Science.”

“..behind garden walls , inside the apothecary shops, and within the well appointed houses of the merchants lived an important community of naturalists. Lime Street was the English outpost of a Europe-wide network of students of nature- including plant hunters, gardeners, rock and fossil collectors, and scholars interested in animals and insects- who eagerly studied the marvelous and manifold properties of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.”

A house martin by Clara Drummond

This book was a present from my brother and has been the inspiration for Kingdom,the series of drawings that I have been working on for the last year and continue to work on for an exhibition in Iceland this summer.

Hoare’s Leviathan seemed to do with words what I wanted to do with images, and so it was that I was tipped headlong into the world of Whales. This passage has particularly resonance for me:

The Arctic whales- bowheads, beluga and narwhals- are the most tantalizing of all cetaceans. rising and falling with the changing seasons of ice, they are barometers of an invisible world, spectrally floating within their bounded sea, locked into it’s cycle. They are philopatrous animals, loyal to the site of their birth, and the only whales to live in the Arctic throughout the year. One hundred thousand belugas swim in polar seas; the geographical remoteness of the less populous bowheads and their outriders the narwhals, is such that they are seldom seen.

Belugas are born grey and only achieve pure white in late adulthood…..their articulated necks allow them to change the shape of their heads, holding them at right angles and lending them a quizzical, human expression. Sailors called them the canaries of the sea on account of their songs.

The narwhal, too, shares the beluga’s sad beauty, a mortality suggested by it’s name- from old Norse, nar and hvalr, meaning ‘corpse whale’, because it’s smudges resemble the livid blemishes on a dead body…The narwhal’s tusk is actually an overgrown tooth which erupts to pierce it’s owner’s lip on the left hand side and spirals up to nine feet long… but for centuries it was identified as the horn of a unicorn, invested with magical powers.

The engraving Melencolia I, 1514, by Albrecht Dürer is an allegorical composition of Melencholia Imaginativa, in which the ‘imagination’ predominates over ‘mind’ or ‘reason’, which he believed artists to be subject to. Erwin Panofsky proposed that this was Dürer’s “spiritual self portrait”. Panofsky also considers many of the objects of the picture to be Saturnian, the planet associated with melancholy; the magic square is a reference to Jupiter and alleviates the melancholic influence of Saturn. Mathematical knowledge is referenced by the use of the symbols: compass, the polyhedron, magic square, scale and the hourglass. It has been suggested that the engraving is much indebted to Plato’s Hippias Major and even more to Luca Pacioli book De Divina Proportia. It was also the inspiration for Anselm Keifer’s installation Volkszalung, 1991, in which a glass polyhedron sits in a towering library made of lead.

During the wars of the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, Plymouth housed many thousands of prisoners. There was a purpose-built prison at Mill Bay as well as smaller ‘shed prisons’ and the notorious prison hulks. Many prisoners of war made items to sell. These included models of ships, usually carved in wood or mutton bone, with human or horse hair for their rigging. They were often stained with colour and some even had mechanisms or moving parts. Sometimes prisoners worked together to produce pieces, but the most skilled men worked alone. This is a model of L’Alexandre, a French ship launched in 1799, was captured by the British at the Battle of San Domingo, off the Caribbean islands of Hispaniola, in 1806. Badly damaged, and unfit for Royal Naval service, the ship became a Plymouth gunpowder hulk.