The Volta Noteboook

This series of drawings, inspired by “Gli Instrumente” of Alessandro Volta, was created on site inside the Volta Museum in Como, Italy. The inventor’s scientific instruments, mostly constructed from wire, copper, wood, and glass, were used in the process of inventing the first battery and the condenser in the late 1700’s. As I worked on these images, Volta’s objects seemed to take on a unique consciousness emanating from both the antique materials and the light refracted by the glass shelves in the museum. Volta’s creative resources–natural phenomena–mirrored many areas of interest for me in my own work. He studied thunderstorms, the aurora borealis, electric fish, and glaciers, as a starting point for his scientific inventions. In my own work, I explore alternate perceptions of the natural world and propose new realities through which we can learn more about the human condition. For instance, as one views the Volta frog experiments, we’re reminded of humanity’s history of diverting valuable inventions like the capture of electricity into devices of torture. I used the museum’s actual English titles translated from Italian to identify each drawing because there was an awkwardness to the them that I found poetic as well as descriptive.