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Cyclopaedia, the showing of Fiona MacDonald's collages at Elizabeth Bay House earlier this year, encapsulated two hundred years of the construction of scientific knowledge and theory. The works—photographic collages comprised of images of shells, birds and other 'naturalia' superimposed over microscopic enlargements—were hung in the library of the house, the room where a reasonable proportion of the colony's scientific research took place under the watchful eye of Alexander Macleay. Here, Macleay classified and catalogued the flora and fauna of the colony according to Linnean specifications. One hundred and fifty years later, MacDonald reconstructs that ordering by taking the specimens out of their sterile cabinets and rearranging them according to visible qualifications of shape, colour and size and then placing them against a background of microscope slide enlargements-images of the unobservable (to the unassisted eye) structures of life. Macleay was unaware of these invisible structures when he catalogued the natural world. His classification was based purely on the observable elements of the world. MacDonald shows us that there is more to it than that.
MacDonald's earlier work was modelled on and presented like an eighteenth century museum of natural history. Cyclopaedia was actually shown within a museum-a storehouse of preserved objects arranged to constitute a picture of the past. MacDonald's images fitted in well with the overall space. The construction of some of the images actually quoted the basic architectural elements of the house: the symmetry of rooms, where each reflects the opposite; the central spiral staircase and the ovoid dome are all 'quoted' by MacDonald's use of 'butterfly' symmetry where one half of the image reflects and repeats the other; the oval frames and cutouts, and, in one piece, two