Cornell’s plaster cast collection and samples from the dendrochronological laboratory feature in a new book by photographer Danielle Mericle, The Dark Wood (Melbourne: Perimeter Editions). Until 2015, Mericle, who now serves as Curator of Visual Materials at Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Oregon, was Director of the Digital Consulting & Production Services at Cornell library. Besides many of our faculty’s digitization projects of visual resources, she also assisted in digitizing the university’s plaster cast collection .
The book features photographs of the casts taken by her and by Annetta Alexandridis during the survey they undertook and which turned into an archaeological journey into the history and various archives of Cornell, including the dendrochronological laboratory. As Mericle writes herself “the book considers broad questions of history and our collective ability to document and learn from the past. Through intertwined images of abandoned Greco-Roman casts, an ancient Sequoia forest and the artist’s own texts,” it “invites us to consider history as a fluid process rather than a static truth.”
