react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

Bound to one another by a single strip of umber ribbon, three pairs of inscribed Atlantic scallop shell-bound pressed seaweed albums rest in the collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Algae, also named ‘seaweed’, ‘sea moss,’ or the romantic if scientifically inaccurate ‘ocean flowers,’ in the nineteenth-century came to be understood as simultaneously ancient, ubiquitous, divine, and curious. It became a fascinating material for early naturalists to collect and for Victorian coastal visitors to lovingly dry and press into delicate albums. As environmental anxieties over increased industrialization, resource exhaustion, and climatic instability in the Victorian period surface in coastal New England, this small, handheld set of three scallop-bound seaweed albums represent a single group’s position within these webs of theoretical discourse. I argue that ecological practices of algae collection formed spaces where gender boundaries could be both enforced or transgressed, where picturesque coastal tourist activity collided with natural history exploration, and where the boundaries between romantic, deified Nature and middle-class white leisure activity meet an enlightened, colonial taxonomy. As a souvenir of personal sentiment, though, this scallop album trio and its inscriptions reflect the lived reality of the three named women inscribed on its pages: Genie M. Lovell, Mrs. T.R. Green, and M.R. Hinckley. Therefore, I argue that within these layered relations, this portable album of natural illustrations exposes the intimate, affective labor through which oceanic imperialism was naturalized, embedding global regimes of classification within personal memories of a seaside New Bedford in transition.