Making a specimen

The manufacture of artificial fruit specimens gained popularity in the late nineteenth century. Despite holding forms of hundred-year old fruits, these specimens, often made from wax, resins and papier-mâché have changed over time as colourants have faded, surfaces have cracked and forms have melted. Responding to two collections of artificial fruit – the Museo della Frutta in Turin and the Museum of Economic Botany in Adelaide – this essay subtly engages with themes of reproduction, translation and change through specimens of fake fruit that oscillate between curiosity, artefact and junk. Drawing on a confluence of life writing and material culture studies, the piece adopts an approach to object writing that foregrounds material change and transformation through observing the quiet dynamism of objects created with the intention of capturing stasis. By conceptualising materiality as implicated in subjectivity and as something inherently unstable, the piece itself participates in these objects’ continual unfolding in a world that is in constant flux.