PENELOPE AITKEN

This video was part of Liminal // A shared distance, an online exhibition from Hatch Contemporary Arts Space and a collective response by over 30 artists, makers, performers and poets from the Banyule area to the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown.

Unknowing

There is a sparkling quartz beach at Kappelshamn on the Swedish island of Gotland in the middle of the Baltic Sea. 

Instead of sand the beach is made of chunky white rocks etched in whirls, dots and the imprints of shells. On closer inspection, nearly every rock is a fossil. 

However when the great naturalist Carl Linnaeus visited this beach in 1741 he thought they were pieces of new coral, because 300 million year old Palaeozoic fossils were an inexplicable concept in a world the Bible deemed only 6,000 years old.

Linnaeus (1707-1778) is undoubtedly one of the most significant scientists of the European Enlightenment.  Most importantly he is responsible for the formal development of the Latin binomial naming system that describes plants, animals, fungi and all life forms to this day. 

Linnaeus named humans Homo sapiens as well as 12,000 other living things, combining genus and species names.

This naming convention allowed scientists from all over Europe to describe and discuss life with each other and to enable this kind of knowledge to progress in great leaps.

Yet this Father of Modern Taxonomy, as he’s known, had many false starts too.

His first attempt at ordering plants in the 1735 edition of Systema Naturae relied on a fully developed, yet eventually discredited system of counting the pistils and stamens in flowers and grouping those with the same number together. 

Early editions of this book also contained a section called ‘Paradoxa’ which listed mythical or apocryphal species - just in case they came to be real.  These included the Hydra, Phoenix, Satyrs and other strange creatures from medieval bestiaries. This section of the book was only maintained for five editions but I love the fact that such an eminent scientist as Carl Linnaeus was open to speculation.

The parts of science I like best are the experiments, hypotheses and supposings – the bits before the facts. And I’m especially attracted to the frisson that occurs when two or more seemingly opposed knowledge systems interact.

In those moments confusion occurs and an unravelling of all that’s been securely known before. Some people can’t get past this – they don’t want their world rocked off its axis.  But if we’re lucky and curious enough to explore new ideas this can lead to an expanded notion of what’s possible, and in turn an even greater sense of all that can never be known.

As an occasional pedant I am increasingly attracted to unknowing.  And as an ardent atheist I’m still drawn to the mystical. I love and believe in hard, factual science, don’t get me wrong.  But serious, outer-limits science, like art, contains wonder, striving and imagination too.

In her 2005 book, A field guide to getting lost, Rebecca Solnit said,

 ‘It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar...’

 Solnit also acknowledges that,

‘Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, ‘live always at the ‘edge of mystery’­—the boundary of the unknown.”’

 However her important distinction is that scientists ‘transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen’ whereas ‘artists get you out into that dark sea.’[i]

Sadly science also gets hijacked by industry, war and colonising impulses.  ‘I wonder what’s over those seas?’ becomes, ‘Land ho – there’s a good place to plant our flag.’

The English ‘discovery’ of Australia was initially a science experiment.

James Cook’s Endeavour voyage of 1768-1770 began as astronomy mission to record the Transit of Venus in Tahiti. Following the transit Cook opened his secret orders to sail on to find the great southern land so many Europeans had either imagined or had bumped into. 

Largely funded by the affluent botanist Joseph Banks, the voyage contained an entourage of naturalists, artists, and their servants who collected 30,000 or more plant specimens mainly for the joy of recording new things.

I’m not suggesting it was a benign expedition. Violent encounters occurred and diseases were exchanged - as well as information and pretty glass beads. However it wasn’t until nine years later that Banks suggested taking possession of Terra Australis for a penal colony, and another nine years until the First Fleet arrived in 1788.

Joseph Banks’ deputy botanist on Cook’s Endeavour voyage was Daniel Solander, a Swede who had come to London in 1760, directly from Carl Linnaeus’ inner circle. Solander was largely responsible for promoting Linnaeus’ binomial system of classification to the English.

Thus the first European names of Australian plants linked them strangely back to Sweden.

In the 250 years since, the naming of Australian things has developed in both divergent and crisscrossing paths, sometime negating and other times acknowledging Aboriginal names and uses.

I feel privileged to live in a time where Aboriginal science practices, including the observation and preservation strategies of nature - are finally, and only just, being recognised. 

One of the most exciting revelations to me in the last few years was being shown the ‘dark emu’ – the elongated black bird shape inside the milky way that has guided the timing of Indigenous egg harvesting practices for millennia.  While western wayfarers and astrologers alike have focused on drawing lines between the pinpricks of starlight, another perspective is gained entirely by looking at the spaces between the points.

In my childhood science and the supernatural co-existed happily.  My parents and many of their parents were health professionals with science training and my brother has also followed that path. Yet my father has always collected early Australiana and most particularly folklore illustrations by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, May Gibbs, Norman Lindsay and more. Not content with rituals at Christmas and Easter he convinced me early that there were fairies at the bottom of our garden and if I left them shiny berries on full moon nights the fairies would leave me presents.  The trick was  - I had to notice the full moon occurring each month for myself.  

Mum’s tastes in fairy tales were less local. She read us, many times, the full set of Tove Jansson’s melancholy Moomin books that, to this day, make me yearn for snowy Scandinavia.

Pseudo science is also intriguing. While I don’t for a second believe in the health efficacy of homeopathy, the voodoo appeal of sharing microscopic essences is metaphorically compelling. 

During the first months of the Covid19 lockdown American jazz pianist Brad Mehldau lamented not being able to play live and sharing the same ‘molecules’ with his audience.  In the same discussion, interviewer and composer, Andrew Ford, described performing in a venue with an audience as being ‘in the same acoustic’[ii]. 

These metaphors relate to my impulse in 2017 to be in the same places that Linnaeus worked and walked up to 300 years ago. His molecules would now be minute but nonetheless the sweat from his labours and sloughings from his notebooks remain in the garden where he taught and worked for 50 years, recycling through generations of plants that live there to this day. 

For the last several years I’ve been making a body of work under the title, ‘What we are made of will make something else’. The work is related to transition states including disintegration and reincarnation, European Enlightenment thinking to Indigenous epistemology, compost to new life, etc. Many of paintings are circular and, besides ordinary paint, they feature plant ink from brewed leaves and flowers. 

Jansson’s trolls and Outhwaite’s fairies creep into these paintings too with watchful eyes and sprays of pixie dust which is sometimes the ash of plants I collected from Linnaeus’ trails around Sweden. To bring these plants back to Australia safely I burnt them in a pan outdoors in a mystical forest with my scientist friend, Emma and our daughters. And as they burnt, the fact of these plants becoming unknowable again was delicious.

[i] Rebecca Solnit, A field guide to getting lost, Penguin, 2005, p.5

[ii] The Music Show, ABC Radio National 4 July 2020