Fragments from an Infinite Catalogue

Fragments from an Infinite Catalogue is a collection of words and images by a scientist and artist who is fascinated by language. John Tāne Christeller began writing poems to explain and extend the screenprints and woodblocks he was making, and found it a natural form of storytelling, including working directly in te reo.

He writes of fable and fabrication, the game of cricket and the pulse of cicadas, the lifespan of geese and the loss of a mother. Here are love songs, memoirs, eulogies, and stories, placed alongside prints and drawings that tell the same tales but in a different way.

This is work that carefully measures the value of things, including the limits of art and memory, and the vitality of the environment that drew the poet to science.