Chapter 11: In which Sylva's objects overflow their shelves.

Reading the articles, I was thinking about wet verses dry mounting, and how in some ways wet mounting makes things more creepy/disgusting, but also more legit. Retaining their liquid, they seem to retain more of It's clear that a wet mount is not just a stuffed animal. Some of Specola's monkeys could be mistaken for children's warm fuzzies. Infatti, some of the animals seem quite poorly taxidermy'd by today's standards and then become either a) fake/stuffed animalish as the fill doesn't match a real body b) creepily gaunt and skinny as the flesh shrinks to the inner framework or c) frankensteinly disturbing with the obvious stitches and piecing together.
It's been a trying week for me, and I thought when I knocked my bottle of shampoo off the overloaded shelf in the shower for at least the 15th time this week, that I'm in the same situation emotionally right now, that when I try to set anything on the shelf, or I bump into a mental wall, some ofl the jars that have been piling up crash to the floor and break open and I'm struck with a nausea from the wave of fumes from the preservatives before I try to rebottle the specimens and put them back on the shelf to dissect later. I want to actually create this metaphor with physical objects, creating more of an old-school wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities than a modern museum, all full of cleanliness and white space. (Blech!) I like the idea of dealing with this messiness, the way art works, natural objects, "freaks of nature," relics, etc. were all cataloged together rather than categorized separately, given boundaries and their own museums. I'm also interested in doing more book binding, and hopefully Susanna and I will get together this week so I can learn an alternative process for printing on cloth.