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Shell (from the Extinction Series)
Shell (from the Extinction Series)
Shell (from the Extinction Series)

Shell (from the Extinction Series)

Artist (American, born 1950)
Author (Italian, 1923 - 1985)
Date1995
MediumVan Dyke print with gouache, watercolor, and pastel
DimensionsImage: 40 1/4 × 25 1/4 in. (102.2 × 64.1 cm)
ClassificationsPhotograph
Credit LineGift of Bobbe Besold, 2015
Object number2015.1.2
DescriptionA vertical composition with dark background. At top are two round shells with spirals at center, at center of composition is one brown and white shell, and at bottom are an assortment of shells on top of a page of a page of text and a guidebook to seashells.
Text Entries

Excerpt: Part I, “‘Spirals’ – Cosmiccomics”, by Italo Calvino.

Text reads as: It was then that I began to secrete calcareous matter. I wanted to make something to mark my presence in an unmistakable fashion, something that would defend this individual presence of mine from the indiscriminate instability of all the rest. Now it's no use my piling up words, trying to explain the novelty of this intention I had; the first word I said is more than enough: make, I wanted to make, and considering the fact that I had never made anything or thought you could make anything, this in itself was a big event. So I began to make the first thing that occurred to me, and it was a shell. From the margin of that fleshy cloak on my body, using certain glands, I began to give off secretions which took on a curving shape all around, until I was covered with a hard and variegated shield, rough on the outside and smooth and shiny inside. Naturally, I had no way of controlling the form of what I was making: I just stayed there all huddled up, silent and sluggish, and I secreted. I went on even after the shell covered my whole body; I began another turn; in short, I was getting one of those shells all twisted into a spiral, which you, when you see them, think are so hard to make, but all you have to do is keep working and giving off the same matter without stopping, and they grow like that, one turn after the other. Once it existed, this shell was also a necessary and indispensable place to stay inside of, a defense for my survival; it was a lucky thing I had made it, but while I was making it I had no idea of making it because I needed it; on the contrary, it was like when somebody lets out an exclamation he could perfectly well not make, and yet he makes it, like "Ha" or "hmph!," that's how I made the shell: simply to express myself. And in this self-expression I put all the thoughts I had about her, I released the anger she made me feel, my amorous way of thinking about her, my determination to exist for her, the desire for me to be me, and for her to be her, and the love for myself

that I put in my love for her -- all the things that could be said only in that conch shell wound into a spiral. At regular intervals the calcareous matter I was secreting came out colored, so a number of lovely stripes were formed running straight through the spirals, and this shell was a thing different from me but also the truest part of me, the explanation of who I was, my portrait translated into a rhythmic system of volumes and stripes and colors and hard matter, and it was the portrait of her as she was, because at the same time she was making herself a shell identical to mine and without knowing it I was copying what she was doing and she without knowing it was copying what I was doing, and all the others we recopying all the others, so we would be back where we had been before except for the fact that in saying these shells were the same I was a bit hasty, because when you looked closer you discovered all sorts of little differences that later on might become enormous. So I can say that my shell made itself, without my taking any special pains to have it come out one way rather than another, but this doesn't mean that I was absent-minded during that time; I applied myself, instead, to that act of secreting, without allowing myself a moment's distraction, never thinking of anything else, or rather: thinking always of something else, since I didn't know how to think of the shell, just as, for that matter, I didn't know how to think of anything else either, but I accompanied the effort of making the shell with the effort of thinking I was making something, that is anything: that is, I thought of all the things it would be possible to make. So it wasn't even a monotonous task, because the effort of thinking which accompanied it spread toward countless types of thoughts which spread, each one, toward countless types of actions that might each serve to make countless things, and making each of these things was implicit in making the shell grow, turn after turn. . .

The quotation that appears in the image is from the short story “Spiral” by the Italian writer Italo Calvino from the book of short stories “Cosmicomics”. The story is about a boy who builds a shell around himself. Text includes, “From the margin of that fleshy cloak on my body, using certain glands, I began to give off secretions which took on a curving shape all around, until I was covered with a hard and variegated shield, rough on the outside and smooth and shiny inside.”

An avid reader and environmentalist, the artist was immersed in early writings about climate change and habitat losses in the late 1980s when she wondered what the world would be like without some of the plants and animals common to her daily life. The result was the “Extinction” series, an homage to the denizens of the rich natural world around her, some of whom have grown increasingly scarce in the years since the images were created.
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