A pair of old-fashioned underpants, some carved marble, an early iteration of the iPod, a mirror of uncertain origin, some Lego. What makes an object valuable: scarcity, sentiment, the genius of the maker or the reputation of the owner?
Sometimes it’s simply a question of presentation. Boutiques and museums understand the value of displaying something separately, on a velvet hanger, or spotlit on a plinth.
Art galleries imply value through complex lineages of patronage and price, as well as by their elegantly sparse installations, perhaps pinning a single photograph, marooned in the whiteness of an otherwise empty wall. As the owners of trophy homes will tell you, nothing shrieks worth like an abundance of space.
Alternatively, value may come from adjacency, an object or artwork getting a boost from the cachet of its neighbour. The reverse is also true. Objects fall out of meaning when their stories are lost. A parent may treasure their child’s first shoes, but junk shops and jumble sales are full of once-beloved objects, now reduced to the status of stuff.
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Connection is everything. In Renaissance Europe the wunderkammer, or kunstkammer, emerged through this belief, as curiosities, fossils, antiquities, taxidermied animals, new inventions and artworks were shown mixed up together.
Translating as wonder room and art room, such collections were known in the English-speaking world as cabinets of curiosities, where meaning was accrued through constellations of items rather than via our more familiar linear narrative of this leading to that, proving this ...
In part this emerged from explorers and conquistadores undermining previous certainties about the limits of the known world through their travels, as well as by the lies they told. Narwhal tusks became the magical horns of unicorns, and “eyewitness” accounts told of half-humans, with the heads, legs, wings or tails of fantastical beasts.
Certainties are off the table once more today, and so, in a timely contemporary evocation of the genre, Kunstkammer opens at Lismore Castle Arts, in Co Waterford, with a manuscript copy of the earliest-known illustration of a cabinet of curiosities, Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’Historia Naturale. Made in 1599, the edition shown here was reprinted in Venice in 1627.
It is displayed beside Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum Historia, from 1642, which blurred the boundaries between natural history and myth to attempt to depict all the creatures of the world. (Both are on loan from Marsh’s Library in Dublin.)
This nicely low-key introduction kicks off a wild ride through the galleries, as Robert O’Byrne, the exhibition’s curator, has sourced antiques and objects from Lismore Castle and other private collections, to show alongside loaned and commissioned artworks by artists who include Sarah Lucas, Dorothy Cross, John Gerrard, Alice Maher, Sasha Sykes and Joseph Walsh.
Crucial to the wunderkammers of the 16th and 17th centuries was the notion of “learning through entertainment” and, after a series of exhibitions at Lismore that have occasionally mistaken an abundance of white space for gravitas, it is a joy to discover colour – and lots of it – as connections make their presence felt everywhere and, as the eyes feast, the mind begins to play.
To all those who have tried and failed to choke down the bitter pill of decluttering, take comfort in the duke of Devonshire’s landing cabinet. Moved directly from one of Lismore’s landings, the display case includes the aforementioned iPod, alongside a roll of Kodak film, some postcards, random metal implements, a coffee maker and instructions for an Aga, all of which either characterise the category of items that can’t be thrown away “because they may be useful some day” or come under the heading of “slightly sentimental, but not enough to frame or stick in an album”.
A writer, curator and lecturer specialising in fine and decorative arts, O’Byrne has a nose for the value of such things. His Irish Aesthete blog and books have become go-to guides for the Ireland of a certain era and class, and his tireless work has been instrumental in returning the stories of the big houses and their people to the essential narrative of who we are today.
He has added to the original contents of the cabinet two small and witty sculptures by the Swiss artist Urs Fischer. Mood Swing and Shadow Self, both from 2019, are made from cast wax, oil and spray paint. Mood Swing sees a nymph disporting with a coffee pot; Shadow Self has elements of the work of the late Irish artist Janet Mullarney as a figure hugs a lumpen creature – although whether it is cherishing, subduing or containing it is entirely up to you.
Flanking the cabinet, a pair of suspended sculptures, Loungers by Sarah Lucas, from 2011, demonstrate the power of art to elevate the everyday. Broken plastic chairs, buckets, tights and fluff become surreal beings. Imagine if Salvador Dalí had run riot in Woodie’s. Alternatively, don’t wait for your dreams: simply think about the hidden lives and potential of the objects that surround us.
Following this narrative of amplified or refocused value, John Kindness has a trio of works, taken from his Odyssey series, shown at the RHA in 2024. Images inspired by Homer’s epic are painted on to an apron, antique cotton pants and a toilet seat. Within these works Kindness brilliantly implies the ordinary origins of the heroic, and the heroic nature of simply facing the mundane, day in and day out.
Another pair of cabinets, this time by the Co Cork maker Joseph Walsh, are remarkable arabesques of ash, in which Walsh bends nature to his will. Destined, no doubt, for a wealthy collector, they currently contain angular bronze and glass “fruit bowls” by Patrick O’Reilly. (All of these works are from 2024.)
It is interesting to see ersatz, uneatable fruit, displayed in what was once a mighty tree, flanking here a 17th-century Italian painted cabinet. Beauty has resided in the eyes of a vast range of beholders over time.
You can have plenty of fun finding and making connections, some overt and some more subtle, throughout the exhibition. Nut Tree Tussock and Garden Tiger Moth, two sculptures from 2023 by the British artist Monster Chetwynd, are large winged insects gaudily made from latex, fabric, paint and cardboard.
These fabulous beasts are shown opposite and beside a delicate watercolour of butterflies and flowers by Lady Edith Blake, dating from the late 19th to early 20th century, and demonstrating that monstrous is frequently simply a matter of scale and perspective.
John Gerrard’s Flag (Danube) is taken from the artist’s digital simulation series exploring pollution in the world’s rivers, which premiered at Galway International Arts Festival in 2017. A glistening oil slick glimmers like a pernicious rainbow on gently undulating waters, reminding those who care to pay attention of the grim toll our polluting pleasures exact.
Outside the gallery windows, the renowned river Blackwater flows by, under pressure from forestry run-off and a disastrous leak into one of its tributaries from an Uisce Éireann-run treatment plant in 2024.
Part of the marvel of art is its ability to transform things so that we may see the world anew; an adjacent theme to this exhibition is the transmutation of objects. Dorothy Cross’s Red Rest, from 2021, is a cushion carved in Damascus rose marble; at its centre is a small human ear. Pillow talk for anyone listening?
Close by is a shell cabinet attributed to the 18th-century artist and chronicler Mary Delaney. An ardent letter writer, Delaney painted vivid pen portraits of life in Georgian Ireland; she is also credited with Ireland’s first shell cottage, at Killala in Co Mayo. Diving into the shell cabinet, complete with slightly disturbing feather chairs, is like immersing yourself in a world where the rules of science, including gravity, cease to exist.
Nearby, Marie Foley’s glass-covered pieces of porcelain, A Boolean Operation, and The Song That Sang the World Before the Spoken Word Existed, both from 2015, are enigmatic essays into the relationship between science, the universe and understanding. This chimes with a further thread that traces the human desire to know.
There have been times in western European history when we have thought we know everything there is to be known, and others when we’ve realised we don’t know the half of it. Now we are emerging from a relatively brief period during which scientists believed that everything was measurable and explicable to the human brain.
Quantum science shows that it is not, and perhaps, for the next while at least, it may be through the alchemy of connections created through the arts that we can come to a richer sense of the world we inhabit, or at very least come to terms with our not knowing.
A series of commissioned works add their own remarkable wonders. The French artist Aurél has made a pair of astonishing Lego constructions, echoing perhaps the Hindu Gothic vibe of Lismore’s neighbouring Dromana Gate bridge, and reflected in a pair of gilt rococo mirrors from the mid-18th century.
Sasha Sykes’s Belonging is a resin chest holding a variety of flowers and plants picked from Lismore Castle’s famous gardens and, in the process of the work’s casting, holding time.
This is shown surrounded by Ed Miliano‘s Dawn Chorus Fartha screen, from 2022, itself another way of capturing the endless flow of nature, seeking to pause it, however briefly, still.
In a third commission, Graham Gingles has made A Curious Box of Curiosity for Mr O, which draws on boxes of curiosities made earlier in the last century by both Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp.
In a determined feat of curation O’Byrne has also managed to borrow a “drawing doom display” from an Irish collection, in which the owner has meticulously collected and labelled items from their family’s history. Broken ceramics abut books, bits of bone, silverware. There are framed, fading photographs, a large oil painting and numerous fossils, rocks and other relics.
Of course it helps if you have a large castle or otherwise enormous pad in which to keep your stuff, as it does if you are in the bracket whose own tastes can define taste. Nonetheless, whether it is an attempt to contain the world, understand the world, hold time or mark our place within it, collecting, and finding context through ordering and connection, will always be a fundamental part of who we are.
Similarly, displaying our wares to demonstrate the way we would like the world to see us will always be a strong human impulse. Kunstkammer invites us into worlds within remarkable worlds, offering endless occasion for happy and fruitful wonder.
Also in Lismore, in the castle’s sister space at St Carthage Hall, Marathon Dance Relief, by the German artist Nicole Wermers, is a sculpted bas-relief frieze, mounted on a line of upturned bar tables, showing scenes drawn from They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Sydney Pollack’s 1969 film. Exploring the desperate lives of those drawn to participate in Depression-era dance marathons, Wermers’s work echoes that of Kindness in showing the heroism of the everyday. It also underlines the brutality of many forms of entertainment that exploit participants for the amusement of today’s spectators. Powerful stuff.
Kunstkammer is at Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore, Co Waterford, until October 26th; Nicole Wermers is at St Carthage Hall until Sunday, May 25th
