Martha Glowacki’s Natural History, Observations and Reflections Martha Glowacki’s Natural History | Page 28

and of knowing that Glowacki has created. The subtle
greens and small metal bees, like those perched in the
seemingly dead dome on My Arcadia (Figures 8 and 9)
are not details present in static and clean scientific
engravings. Yet, they inhabit Glowacki’s translations
of the ways modes of scientific representation present
the natural world: viewers look closely at her work and
develop their own intuitions that even metal plants have
the potential for regeneration.
Glowacki’s work reveals the metaphors, artistry, and
implications necessarily present in scientific investigation.
These revelations are not intended to critique historic
experimenters and collectors who were attempting to
understand and order impossible-to-capture sense
impressions. Rather, her work allows viewers to connect
and to empathize with these thinkers by looking
through her creations at layers of represented experience.
Glowacki’s work exposes her strong intuition about the
importance of both scientific discovery and its inevitable
gaps—lacunas that require an artist’s material intuition
to be made apparent.
Sarah Anne Carter, Ph.D.
The Chipstone Foundation
Notes
1 Julian Rohrhuber, “Intuitions / Anschauungen”,
Faits Divers, No 1 (July 3, 2007), http://wertlos.org/
faits_divers/files/faits_divers_01.pdf, accessed online:
October 30, 2016.
2 Sarah Anne Carter, Object Lessons: How Nineteenth
Century Americans Made Sense of the Material World
(Forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 2017).
3 Charles Bonnet, Recherches sur l’usage des feuilles dans
les plantes, pl. VII. Leiden : E. Luzac (1754). Stephen
Hales, Stephen Hales, 1677–1761. (17271733). Vegetable
staticks, or, An account of some statical experiments on the
sap in vegetables: being an essay towards a natural history of
vegetation: also, a specimen of an attempt to analyse the air,
by a great variety of chymio-statical experiments, which were
read at several meetings before the Royal Society. Two volumes.
London: Printed for W. and J. Innys ... and T. Woodward ...,
1727–1733.
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Martha Glowacki’s Natural History, Observations and Reflections
Joseph Goldyne and Thomas Garver, Cabinets of
Curiosities: Four Artists, Four Visions (Madison:
Elvehjem Museum, 2000) 55–63.