Wonder has an established link to the history and philosophy of science. However, there is little acknowledgement of the relationship between the visual arts and wonder. In this book, artists, curators and art theorists give accounts of their approach to wonder through the use of materials, objects and ways of exhibiting.

Introduction

Christian Mieves and Irene Brown

Part I: Taxonomy, Structures and Identities

1. Archives of Wonder: Collecting the Liminal in Contemporary Art

Tiffany Shafran

2. One Hour: Visual Practice Exploring a Collective History

Shirley Chubb

3. Wonders Without Wonder: Divining the Donkey-Rat

Will Buckingham

4. Wonder, Subversion and Newness
Runette Kruger

5. The Snow Globe as Object of Wonder

Anne Hilker

6. From Nimbus Cloud to Cloud Canyon: Artistic Practice and the Idea of Wonder in Contemporary Art

Christian Mieves

Part II: Contemporary Curatorial Practices

7. Spectral Exhibitions: 'The Wonders of the Invisible

World' (or, Exhibiting Contradiction - Known Knowns and Unknown Unknowns)

Alistair Robinson

8. Wonder on Tour

Irene Brown

9. Coral-Fishing and Pearl-Diving: Curatorial Approaches to Doubt and Wonder

Marion Endt-Jones

10. Preternatural: Curating Wonder

Celina Jeffery

Part III: Contemporary Artistic Practice and the Function of Wonder

11. Collecting Skulls and Hair: In Pursuit of Wonder in Death's Chambers

Jane Wildgoose

12. Wunderkammer of the Now: In Search of the Wunderbare: Romanticising as a

Contemporary Fine Art Practice

Laura Kuch

13. The Enemies of Wonder: An Itinerant Conversation

Silke Dettmers and Mark Sanderson

14. Claude Glass Re-visited: '...the largest down to the smallest balls of mercury reflect the entire universe.'

Alison Dalwood

15. Photographing the Wunderkammer: a Personal Journey of art Making and Meaning

Terry Ownby

16. Gothic Wonder in the Contemporary Landscape

Juliette Losq

Christian Mieves is a painter and Senior Lecturer at Wolverhampton University, UK. Recent publications include journal articles on Luc Tuymans, Dana Schutz and the Beach in Contemporary Art Making. He has been co- editor of the special edition of the Journal of Visual Art Practice 9.3 (2010) and works currently on a special journal edition on erosion and visibility (forthcoming 2017).

Irene Brown is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Newcastle University, UK Recent projects include Poetics of the Archive: Creative Community Engagement with the Bloodaxe Archive, an AHRC funded project at the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, 2015; Phantasmagoria Electric, an installation, exhibited as part of the Twice Upon a Time: Magic, Alchemy and the Transubstantiation of the Senses, Centre for Fine Art Research, School of Art, Birmingham Institute of Art & Design, 2014 and International Research Fellowship at the Bakken Museum of Electricity and Mesmerism, Minneapolis, USA, 2013.