This project was originally inspired by a display of iridescent beetles at the Natural History Museum and displays of anthropological objects at the Pitt Rivers Museum.This “specimen” collection has an affinity with both cultural or anthropological and natural history collections (lepidoptery, entomology, botany). It can also be seen as a “meta” collection commenting on the nature and characteristics of a collection. In focussing on the concepts integral to a collection – system, display, categorisation and selection – all of which are essential to our ability to make sense of the world around us and within us, it poses questions about the theoretical underpinning of our knowledge. In this particular collection, the collector is also the creator, creating not only the specimens but also the world being collected. The materials and their combinations are chosen, and to that extent predetermined, but the actual specimens come into being as a result of the confluence of chance and purpose. The number of possible specimens is infinite, (bounded only by constrictions on making them) thus in this respect they do not resemble objects “out there” in the world, whose number is always finite. The traditional collection can always aim at totality whereas in the case of this collection that would be a logical impossibility. While self-contained by definition (the collection refers only and necessarily to itself and not to the world or anything in the world) it can be seen as mimicking a taxonomy, as representing the abstract idea of classification and as a reference to the fact that classifying is a human activity imposed on nature artificially; nature is not actually classified and formally structured although it serves our purposes to see it that way. Whereas categorisation and classification are normally used to pin down meaning, here the ambiguity of the specimens act as a springboard for the imagination, leaving interpretation open to the viewer. Some of the questions which may be asked about them (which of course could never be definitively answered) are: are the scraps of paper the actual specimens or are they the representations of specimens? Do they represent moments? Do they, in the words of Baudrillard “establish dominion over time, interrupting its continuous flow and classifying its parts”…translating “real time into the dimensions of a system”? What relationship do they bear to Rorschach and his system of inkblots to determine psychological traits according to the viewer’s interpretation of their content? Since the “system” here is an enclosed one, with no referent in the world, these specimens are not subject to the type of definitive interpretation that Rorshcach needs for his theory. Can they perhaps, more mystically, be seen as fleeting physical manifestations of other-worldly phenomena, of noumena, not knowable by our senses, but only by our intellects or souls as, for example in Plato’s world of Ideas? The specimens can be looked at shamanically or scientifically (both, ultimately, systems of thought for making sense of the world). When they are enlarged and the resulting aura-like image mapped onto graph paper this is akin to a forensic scientific process, but reveals no more about their essential nature, does not clarify anything substantive, merely reveals other ways of viewing them. Could this, too, be a comment on the scientific process? The essence of the work is paradox and multiple ambiguity which, according to Borges, is essential to all art. Among the artists I have looked at are Douglas White, Emily Prince, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Vija Celmins, Lisa Millroy and Matt Collishaw.