Eloquent Eggs & Disintegrating Dice

Eggs and dice — what do they have to with art? The title at first seems bizarre, but it is quite fi tting for the work of Rosamond Purcell. The exhibition *Eloquent Eggs & Disintegrating Dice* opened last Wednesday at the Silver Eye Center for Photography.

The exhibition is divided into two parts. The first is Purcell’s latest project, which took her to the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology (WFVZ). WFVZ has the largest egg and nest collection in the world and is also a research and education institution dedicated to bird conservation. Examining the ornithological treasures of the WFVZ, Purcell produces pictures that are almost artifacts.

The patterns of egg shells range from the dotted lumps and bumps of the Guira cuckoo eggs to the smooth and almost candy-coated bright shine of Tinamou eggs in a rough stone container. The textures of egg shells are zoomed in on, which allows us to closely examine the textures. There is immense diversity even in the texture of the shells. One of the photographs captures the intricacy of nests; different materials are woven together. When seen from far away, the nest may seem just like a basket, but Purcell’s photographs show us the delicacy and effort of the birds. She depicts the diverse beauty, quirkiness, and allure of eggs and the remarkable resourcefulness of birds through this exhibition.

“We’ve been wanting to exhibit her work, but this is the right timing since her book just came out,” Amanda Bloomfield, a curator at Silver Eye Center, said about the exhibition. Purcell’s photographs are featured in Egg & Nest. The book fuses science and art; the photographs convey the appreciation for biology and evolution. It further explains about the history of egg collecting and bird watching. These are natural history, and they are also the most natural art.

The second part of the exhibition contains the various photographs of disintegrating dice. This project was inspired by a decomposing and crumbling dice collection belonging to magician Rick Jay, one of Purcell’s good friends. He personally asked Purcell to record the “dying of the dice.” The dice are made out of celluloid, which is a notoriously unstable substance, unlike plastic which can last a very long time. Purcell’s suite of photographs captures the texture and the vibrant colors of dying dice.

“These dice were donated at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. If you see the pictures from that exhibition, you can see that Purcell’s photographs of dice are slightly different,” Bloomfield said. The scale of dice is also out of proportion, which brings a different perspective on the dice. These photographs were featured in Rick Jay’s book, *Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck*.

Purcell finds the most ordinary objects and turns them into a piece of art or an artifact. We have seen eggs and dice before, but when we see her work, we realize that she has scrutinized the ordinary objects and captured the different aspects of those objects. We haven’t seen the shiny eggs or close-up intricately woven nests. Her photographs offer us a new view of these ordinary objects.

“She has definitely done some very interesting work in the past, including photographs of the skins, bones, carapaces, shells, and preserved bodies remains,” Bloomfield said of Purcell. She has long collaborated with natural museums, and her work has been published in various books. One of her more recent works, Book Worm, is a book containing photographs of decayed old books, praising their beauty as raw material in collages of dissolution of objects.

She is also a writer, having majored in English in college. Owls Head, one of her books, details her long friendship with William Buckminster. Buckminster is a collector of antiques, and owns a now-famous antiques shop and junkyard in Maine. When Purcell was asked why she chose to write more instead of speaking with her photography in an interview with The Boston Globe, she answered, “I wanted to articulate a philosophy of objects, and you just can’t show that in pictures.”

Through the writing and studying of the junkyard, she was able to answer some questions about the material world. She said, “I came to understand that each of these objects was meaningful within a constellation of other objects.” Purcell tries to make sense of these objects through her art. As a result, her photographs help us to understand the signifi cance behind them. After seeing the exhibition, one may never look at eggs and dice the same way.