Katja Wagner

Supervisor: Professor Philip Goad

objecting: a nuanced endeavour
stitching Cook Cloak

How could modes of curatorial display (such as the vitrine or Wunderkammer), calibrated by a language of observation, articulate an architecture of enclosure that reframes Cooks’ Cottage as a museological object and evokes deeper site histories?

2020 has been a year of far reaching political upheaval and historical reassessment. Alongside grassroots condemnation of colonial agents precipitated by social justice developments in the USA and UK, was the marking of 250 years since the Endeavour’s landing at Botany Bay. Captain James Cook, a global symbol of colonial exploit, has entered the debate in a polychromy of penned, embodied and spray-painted rhetoric. If ever there was a time to return to Cooks’ Cottage, it is now.

Despite the contiguous web of debate, reflection and sentiment surrounding Cooks’ Cottage, it appears to present a unique challenge. As a relocated, occupiable relic, whose current context problematises rather than clarifies meaning, it is perhaps revealing to momentarily look beyond the spheres of colonial and monumental discourse, and to the practices of museum display. Indeed, the Cottage has always existed as a didactic instrument of modern historical object-learning.

With the intent to physically reframe the Cottage within its contemporary context, a boundary condition was defined, unfolding into an open cabinet of curiosities hinged about the Cottage perimeter. In extension of this collecting sensibility and in response to the gardens and the cast of characters entwined in the Cottage narrative, a conical seed archive is caught within the museological warp and weft. Hence pulling through this object-focused landscape is the continuous thread of layered observation. This language draws upon the scientific instruments of analysis and documentation familiar to Cook and Grimwade in parallel to the fragmentary remains of an underlying Indigenous landscape, embodied most enigmatically by a ghosted central stream. The ‘Cooks’ of ‘Cooks’ Cottage’ shift from possessive subject to associate object.

Through the binding medium of this ‘Cook Cloak’, the woven Wunderkammer and seed archive act as agents of reclamation and exposure, adding depth to the role of the Cottage in cultural debate and everyday interaction to facilitate more nuanced engagement. By creating distance from its immediate context, the Cottage confronts its contemporary identity and by externalising its domesticated collection, enters into the rhetoric of its own display. In parallel, the seed repository and fire pit resonate with the lost natural history of the site whilst creating space for traditional ceremony and knowledge exchange. Experiencing the Cottage and observing it from an elevated position, the structure can be understood as an architectural accretion and the inner curtain of a larger and more complex display. In spirit of the dialogic intent of the civic museum, ultimately these interventions aspire to stitch into to the new era of cultural exchange and reflection which 2020 has intensified, empowered by the house not so much as a Cottage but a curatorially situated and haptically experienced artefact, pinned at the bifurcated focus of an open-weave, deeply rooted vitrine.

Virtual display: https://at.studio/msdthesis_2020sm2_indie#model=085fe3a0-27c3-11eb-8fc7-93f433ca2c64.