Week 4 (Week 1 of Methods of Cataloguing)

This week I started looking at Andrew Garrett’s 19th-century fish illustrations via the Harvard Digital Collections.

Honestly, my first thought was:
“omg these are so cute”
The colours looked soft, and the proportions were charmingly off.

However … Once I started actually looking at the fish, the drawings shifted from aww cute to … these are kind of bad? Why did Harvard keep these?”
The anatomy is inconsistent, the shading is stiff, and the colours are nothing like the real fish.
This moment of going from affection → suspicion essentially kickstarted my entire enquiry.

It made me realise that Garrett’s drawings were not just quirky mistakes; they were scientific documents treated as authoritative despite their flaws.

These early experiments made me realise that the core of my enquiry wasn’t simply Garrett’s drawings, but the systems behind them:

• the Linnaean taxonomy that categorized species through a Eurocentric visual logic,
• the contrast with Indigenous naming systems, which are behavioural, ecological, and embedded in lived experience,
• and the broader colonial circulation of knowledge, where specimens, drawings, and names travelled through networks that privileged European interpretation over local understandings.

This clarity pushed me to deepen the project in the second week, shifting from playful interventions to a more structured investigation into how colonial science shaped our contemporary understanding of Pacific ecologies.

Research

I spent time reading Kris Manjapra’s chapter on science and colonial power, attached below. I didn’t expect it to influence my project so directly, but I ended up feeling very inspired by how clearly the text explains the relationship between Linnaean taxonomy, empire-building, and the circulation of “universal” scientific knowledge through colonial networks.

Manjapra describes how European naturalists treated the world as a vast repository waiting to be catalogued, and how Linnaeus’ naming system became a tool for reorganising other people’s ecologies into a single European framework. This perspective helped me make sense of why Garrett’s drawings, despite being flawed, inconsistent, and often inaccurate, were still absorbed into institutional archives like Harvard’s and treated as scientific truth.

Week 5 (Methods of Cataloguing Week 2)

In Week 1, I was testing approaches such as recolouring, mimicry, language comparisons.
In Week 2, these experiments started forming a clearer question:

How can I re-catalogue Garrett’s specimens in a way that makes visible the tensions between Linnaean taxonomy, Indigenous naming, and the colonial pathways through which these drawings travelled?

One of the first things I did this week was build a geographical map tracing where the specimens were collected, how they travelled via whaling routes, and where they became classified. From here, I initially wanted to make an interactive map/website whereby clicking on each collection point would lead to re-contextualised/re-catalogued information on said species.

But as I kept working, especially after building the map and starting my case-study spreads, the project naturally shifted toward a publication format.
The more I compared Linnaean names, Indigenous names, ecological behaviour, and Garrett’s formal inaccuracies, the more I realised that these layers needed to sit side by side on the page.
The printed format allowed for slower, comparative reading, not just navigation.

Even though the publication format made the most conceptual sense for the project, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the visual outcome of the spreads at this stage. The content felt strong, but the visual system wasn’t as coherent as I wanted ; the typography and layout still feel slightly disconnected from one another.

Because of that, I’m now actively working on strengthening the visual language of the publication: refining how the taxonomic comparisons sit on the page, reconsidering how much hierarchy I give to different types of information, and making sure the illustrations, maps, and language analyses feel like they belong to the same world.

This is something I plan to keep developing so the publication doesn’t just function conceptually, but also reads visually as a unified, intentional re-cataloguing system.

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