Wig Rest
circa early to mid-nineteenth century
(blown glass, paint and water-coloured engravings)
This orb is as striking as it is curious. Up close, it appears to be anything than what it actually is. Neatly laid out across the inner face of its sphere, the frozen circus of humanised beasts - each impeccably dressed - floats against the starry backdrop of speckled golds and of sprays of inky blues and reds and greens. A squatting donkey plays a red flute while its companion neighs and struts to its own improvised song; a slender brown bird, music sheets in hand, gazes up keenly at a perching parrot, posed with its wings outstretched, who stares intently into the beyond, at us; and a large kneeling camel, its arm resting gently on what looks like a wooden barrel, attired as a casual Middle Eastern, its lush beard swathing its neck and its blue-striped sash nipping its waist tightly. As its audience, intent on discovering its secret, we fall under the orb’s spell. We peer closer and closer into its seamless window; its skies seem to scintillate and shimmer, playing slight tricks with our eyes and casting our unsuspecting imaginations farther than we may be ready to accept.
And it is at this point that the orb’s literal function makes sense. More than being a miniature world of fantasy; more than showcasing a precise degree of anonymous handiwork and technical skill; and more than representing an era in which new forms of printing made way for refined standards in decorative art, this glass orb is an emblem of the human mind. It is a gateway stylised to the fashions of its epoch, a gateway both in the metaphysical and simply physical senses. It dedicates a part of its time to visually luring in the curious, using its props to toy between fact and fiction, while during the rest of its time promptly becoming the artificial mind underneath a fancy (or not) weave of hair.
