SPECIMEN 1963

Recently landed: Specimen 1963

Shrink your own form and see the world anew. A hint, but a peep, at our new work, imagining the world as viewed through the eyes of a female Velvet ant, commissioned (excitingly!) by Professor Dr Chus Martínez and the Potter Museum of Art, for the forthcoming wonderment, A velvet ant, a flower, and a bird, and printed by Luke Ingram at Arten.

Inspired by the concept of Charles Frederick Holder’s (1851–1915) Half hours in the tiny world: wonders of insect life, tilt your head to the side and wonder at this ‘tiny world’ writ large. From the Australian Museum collection of minerals, we have traced outlines to form the landscape of the Velvet ant, or, more specifically, ‘Specimen 1963’, with her thorax of amber glass. It is comprised of Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, but in the shape, now, of Azurite, Angelsite, Cuprite on Calcite, and shafts of Rhodochrosite. Because the world ‘Specimen 1963’ understands is as vast as it is, we fancy, saturated.

Continuing reading on Marginalia.

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9th of February, 2026

Over the past few days, we have had the absolute pleasure of seeing our Velvet ant take her final steps from conversation, idea, research, screen, redraft, tinker, inked, and spliced to installed in the gallery. Our ‘tiny world’ writ large of a single Velvet ant’s journey is a digital collage, spanning 8 metres in length.