Cornelius Ponders His Ancestors

 This is one of those pieces that took over a year to make. Nothing was bought specifically for this piece. Most items were either found or given to me. The only things I purchased were the "desk" and the stand both at a thrift store. I had a concept and I had started gathering the pieces for it in a pile in a corner of my studio, I would take it out and put it on the table and move the parts around but it just wasn't coming together and then one day...It just came to me how to make it work. (originally it was on a big piece of wood)

I wanted to make a companion piece to my Ode to Charles Wilson Peale, AKA Cabinet of Curiosities.

 It all started with the dinosaur model that was given to me. I decided to name him Cornelius.  I picture him as a storybook character come to life at the Museum of Natural History across from Central Park in New York. He is trying to figure out how he fits into the history of the world.

The bones have been collected by me on various hiking and biking excursions. 

The crab and lobster parts were smuggled out of a restaurant in a napkin by my daughter, she was trying to hide them from her dad who I'm pretty sure told her not to take them.  The "desk" is a picture frame that contains a copy of a drawing of Darwin's head on a monkey's body and a real fossil in a stone. 

The black object in the foreground is a fossil. The human brain was made from clay by the same daughter for a project she was working on. I happened to have the box in which it fit perfectly. The brain was not originally part of the piece but I kind of like it in there to put a human touch on things and mix it up a little.