Figure 10. Kelloggs & Comstock, The life & age of woman. Stages of woman’ s life from the cradle to the grave, 1848, hand-colored lithograph, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
This cycle is less linear than the traditional The life & age of woman. Stages of woman’ s life from the cradle to the grave,( 1848) suggesting that external interventions may offer new life, that beauty and symmetry is not natural but deliberate, and that rejuvenation is always possible( Figure 10). These scenes suggest ways of controlling not merely describing nature. Working in a similar way, What Every Woman Ought to Know( 2002 – 2003), is a cabinet that presents an historic view of the strictures that shaped women’ s lives, from historic makeup and a dramatic and somehow dark model of a bustle, to photographs and documentation of physiological studies( Figure 11). The form of the cabinet with its drawers suggests that these items are meaningful and sorted as traces or documents of important phenomena, and make the viewer acutely aware of how controlled the sense experience it offers may be. These wondrous things provoke curiosity about the authorship of its creator. Her point of view is represented through its drawers— in effect, it gives access to her own sense experience of the selected and created things. These cabinets could inhabit an historic interior, but their contents could only exist in the context of Glowacki’ s exploration of the power of historic and scientific modes of meaning making. They offer access to a kind of sense impression that suggests an intuition about the artist and her take on the world, even as they make clear the limited and particular function of the cabinet as an analytical tool. 4
The scale of Glowacki’ s work encourages viewers to use her sculpture— gazing through lenses, turning cranks, and opening drawers. Viewers look closely, touch, think, and empathize with historic thinkers who struggled with conveying sensory experience. The problem of
22 Martha Glowacki’ s Natural History, Observations and Reflections