Stills Gallery in Sydney, Australia, currently has an exhibition entitled Thirteen This provides a selection of work from a wide range of photographic artists ---Thirteen refers to the number of artists--- and, as there is no online exhibition catalogue, it is a matter of dipping in and having a look around.

My interest here is the work of Robyn Stacey. She is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney and has a fascination with natural history and museum collections.

The images in The Collectors Nature represent the collections of the Sydney-based Macleay Museum and Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney, as well as the National Herbarium of the Netherlands at Leiden. Stacey references Alexander Macleay, the Australian collector who spent his leisure time importing plants from around the world, whilst her compositions of old and rare books of botanical illustrations refer back to the work of Dutch still life painting.

In terms of the photographic histories tentatively mapped in this earlier post Stacey is part of the generation of photomedia artists who came to prominence in the 1980s. These artists were unconcerned with, even suspicious of, the claims to truth by various styles of personal documentary photography dominant in art museums in the 1970s. They turned away from reportage style photography and embraced visual culture as a source rather than the ‘real’ world. The artists of this postmodernist movement happily appropriated images from the past as well as popular culture, including the look of ‘old master’ paintings or fifties and sixties magazines and television.

Stacey’s series works, such as Kiss kiss bang bang 1985 and All the sounds of fear 1990, were grounded in popular culture with a slightly sixties Pop look, but presented a somewhat anxious and edgy contemporary world. By contrast her work since the 1990s has made use of natural science and a number of natural history museum collections in which she worked during several residencies.