julian rowe
julian rowe
visual artist
visual artist
...the broken love of doctor browne
The broken love of Doctor Browne
2005. Resin, acrylic, mixed media, wood, Perspex, CD recording
“Time hath endlesse rarities, and shows of all varieties; which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth, and
even earth it self a discovery”
Increasingly I have been fascinated by the way that landscape can be read as a document of past human
presence, and how, beyond the scientific investigations of the archaeologist, the earth contains an accumulation of emotional resonances.
Many of the objects that I make are rusty and fragmented abstractions and have a sense of having been found or dug up, implying a
forgotten function and story. It seemed that an interesting experiment would be to put them into an ambiguous narrative context, and
thus the collection of Doctor Browne came about. It was a museum within a museum and the decayed state of Browne’s enigmatic and abandoned
collection made it archaeology twice over.
Who was Doctor Browne? When I was planning the work I came across Urne Buriall by Sir Thomas
Browne (1605-1682), a treatise which began with a description of some recently discovered funerary urns, but developed into a meditation
on mortality and the futility of memorials. This piece of writing perfectly encapsulated what I was trying to achieve with the installation
so I appropriated Browne’s name for the title.
The voice that occasionally emanated from Doctor Browne’s radio in the installation
was a 1936 South African recording of a lullaby sung in a language that is now lost. Nobody knows what it means.
