Cabinets of Wonder & Joseph Cornell

I have always been fascinated with Cabinets of curiosities (also known as Wunderkammer, Cabinets of Wonder, or wonder-rooms). I have always wanted to take a stab at making one for myself and have been collecting odds and ends for years with that goal in mind. I made a piece for a gallery show I was in last summer at Mariposa Gallery that was kind of along the lines of something like a Wunderkammer but grew into more of a box of secrets. I designed a scene for the top and when it was done, I looked at it and thought "it reminds me of the phrase "a little bird told me".....which then of course led me to secrets.....which then led me to a book I had purchased and later regretted..... Post Secret. It is a collection of postcards with secrets people want to get off their chest, sent annonomously to a man who publishes them in books and online. It is a kind of performance art project and quite amazing, but the books are so so so depressing! I did not know this when I bought the book and used the "A Little Bird Told Me" piece to get the book out of my house! I cut it up and pasted the pages on cards and filed them under catagories in this box. Finally I was free! Wahoo!......but I was still really intrigued by the box (I loved the box and the process of making the box) and started doing more research on this kind of composition. I stumbled upon a kids kit/craft/art history book on a man named Joseph Cornell and absolutely fell in love. He is very famous and his work is in many museums. We was an odd duck, which just makes his work all the more fascinating to me. With that in mind, I thought I would post some info on him and some sources you might like to visit to purchase things to make your own boxes! I found some amazing sites with materials like antique and vintage ledger pages, ephemera, vintage ribbon, buttons, etc. I'll add more later, but at the bottom are some to get you started! So many times this kind of stuff is overpriced but some sites are really great about keeping the prices affordable. Bocage has tulle fringe!!! Who has tulle fringe!! Holy cow!If you know of any other sites for this kind of stuff, please let me know!!!


"[Cornell] spent most of his life in a frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York, with his mother and his crippled brother, Robert. From there this reclusive, gray, long-beaked man would sally forth on small voyages of discovery, scavenging for relics of the past in New York junk shops and flea markets. To others, these deposits might be refuse, but to Cornell they were the strata of repressed memory, a jumble of elements waiting to be grafted and mated to one another.
"In the studio he would sort his finds into their eccentric categories - 'Spiders,' 'Moons,' and so forth - and file them with boxes of his own mementos, like love letters to Jennifer Jones and other movie stars or ballet dancers he'd never met; and from them he made boxes. He would tinker with them for years. Object (Roses des Vents) was begun in 1942 and not finished until 1953. It is full of emblems of voyages Cornell never took, a little box of mummified waves and shrunken exotic coasts, peninsulas, planets, things set in compartments, with a drop-in panel containing twenty-one compasses, each with its needle pointing insouciantly in a different direction from that of its neighbor. Even the map on the inside of the lid, cut from some nineteenth-century German chart book, depicts an excessively remote coastline: that of the Great Australian Bight. The earth is presented not as our daily habitat but as one strange planet among others, which to Cornell it was.
Sometimes he would crack the glass pane that protected the contents of the box, but that is all he allowed in the way of violence - it suggests that the sanctuary of imagination has been attacked. That glass, the 'fourth wall' of his miniature theater, is also the diaphragm between two contrasting worlds. Outside, chaos, accident, and libido, the stuff of unprotected life; inside, sublimation, memory, and peace, one of whose chief emblems was the caged bird, the innocent resident of The Hotel Eden, 1945.

- From "American Visions", by Robert Hughes

Sources for great vintage and antique ephemera, etc.

Collage Closet
Ornamentea
Bocage New York