Research Catalog
Owls Head / Rosamond Purcell.
- Title
- Owls Head / Rosamond Purcell.
- Author
- Purcell, Rosamond Wolff
- Publication
- New York : Quantuck Lane Press ; Distributed by W.W. Norton & Co., c2003.
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| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text | Request in advance | TR140.P87 P87 2003 | Off-site |
Holdings
Details
- Description
- 239 p. : ill.; 21 cm.
- Summary
- "On the way to Owls Head Lighthouse, you couldn't help but drive by William Buckminster's property, eleven acres packed with ... well ... stuff - a vast array of scrap metal and windows, possibly the largest collection of wooden lobster buoys in the world - all of it in states of disintegration. Once an antiques shop and a scrapyard, this jumbled collection had become something of a tourist attraction in itself."
- "Rosamond Purcell, the Boston-based artist and photographer whom Ricky Jay calls the "doyenne of decay," discovered Buckminster's place more than twenty years ago and was immediately and permanently awestruck. Best known for her work in the back rooms of natural history museums.
- Purcell plunged into Buckminster's vast realm with the compulsive curiosity of a true collector - but her ideas of value don't always coincide with traditional antiques shoppers. A pile of broken clocks, busted birdhouses, mountains of chandeliers - Buckminster wonders what Purcell will do with the things she buys. "This is the kind of thing I'd take to the dump," he tells her.
- But Purcell will bestow her finds classifications based on "what else they are." In her eyes, fragmented comic strips and television schedules stuck to cement slabs become Rosetta stone-like artifacts, a strangely shaped tree root is transformed into a gigantic snail, and moldy books assume their own geography."
- "Owls Head details the twenty-year friendship that grows between Purcell and Buckminster as she excavates and catalogs the detritus that threatens to overwhelm him. Along the way, Purcell gathers prized scraps of information about Buckminster himself.
- From the origins of the sprawl, to his much-vaunted skills in the pool hall, to his dreams for his most precious possession, Owls Head brings Buckminster to life with a photographer's eye for detail. Part archaeology, part taxonomy, part New England yarn, and always a labor of love. Owls Head is a polished meditation on the beauty of decay, the comfort of objects, and the human quest for meaning."--Jacket.
- Subject
- Genre/Form
- Anecdotes
- Autobiographies
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-236).
- Processing Action (note)
- committed to retain
- Contents
- Breaking ground -- Infiltration -- Disintegration -- Digging deeper -- Transgression -- Underground -- Passing through -- Still point -- The foundry -- Rag and bone shop -- In the trenches -- A wonderful life -- Transcription -- The barn.
- ISBN
- 0971454868 (hc)
- LCCN
- ^^2003008538
- OCLC
- 52208674
- SCSB-13477548
- Owning Institutions
- Harvard Library