Molly Duggins – författare

How did scientists, artists, designers, manufacturers and amateur enthusiasts experience and value the sea and its products? Taking a fresh approach to oceanic history, this book brings together material culture, oceanography, and environmental history to uncover marine object and display histories and the role they played in nineteenth-century culture.Scientific exploration, colonial expansion, industrialization, and the rise of middle-class tourism transformed the way the ocean was seen and experienced. Its mystery, made tangible through processing and representational technologies, captivated practitioners and audiences. Combining essays and case studies by scholars, curators, and scientists, this book investigates the collecting and display, illustration and ornamentation, and trade and consumption of marine flora and fauna, analysing their material, aesthetic and commercial dimensions. Traversing global art history, the history of science, empire studies, anthropology, ecocriticism and material culture, it surveys the currency of marine matter in the economies and ecologies of a modernizing ocean world.By highlighting the relevance and role the ocean world played in modern science and industry, art and culture, this book demonstrates the vital interconnectivity of art and science and the importance of ocean-oriented perspectives in the understanding of modern history.

This boundary-breaking volume examines an array of objects that, in various ways, complicate narrow definitions of art and Australian identity. It shows how each object has informed and enriched contemporary Australian personal and political life in complex, often overlooked ways. Featuring essays and object case studies by leading and emerging art historians, artists, curators, historians and anthropologists, The Australian Object offers a material intervention into Australian art and cultural histories by highlighting objects that expand definitions of art, nationhood and identity. It employs an object-led approach that combines art history’s attentiveness to form and meaning with material culture’s concern for use, materials and patterns of movement, incorporating methodologies from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Knowledge systems, art-making, museology, post- and de-colonialism, ecology, design and theology. Focusing on the useful, mobile and multi-sensory aspects of objects, contributors follow their trajectories across cultures, times and places, and through international networks of trade and migration, connecting Australia with China, Vietnam, Iran, England, France and the USA.The book is divided into five thematic sections: Living Objects, Collecting Objects, Migrating Objects, Monumental Objects and Immaterial Objects. Rather than chronological or geographical groupings, these sections articulate the shared material qualities of objects and their place in a network of makers and users. Furniture, ceramics, photo-montage, signage and boardgames are newly examined as material agents shaping social, cultural, political and religious life in Australia and beyond. Accordingly, the very term 'Australian object’ is called into question as writers propose divergent frameworks that emphasise connection and interchange, bringing to light the material culture that Australia has shaped, denied and inspired.