Wonder: Ideas for closer looking. - Page 48

Editor’s note

Wonder

Selected for evidence, scale, close looking and clear explanations of unfamiliar subjects.

Q1935

DriveLanguage

Since 1989, Kaurna people and collaborating linguists have reclaimed the Adelaide Plains language from community knowledge and nineteenth-century records for teaching and public use.

German missionaries wrote down substantial Kaurna vocabulary and grammar in the 1840s, even as colonisation was breaking the conditions for transmission on the Adelaide Plains. More than a century later, Kaurna leaders used those records as tools—not authorities—to reconstruct pronunciation, create new terms and place the language in welcomes, songs, education and signage. Reclamation does not pretend the rupture never happened. It makes an ethical reversal: paper gathered under colonial power now serves living Kaurna decisions.

Kaurna languageRead card

Q1936

WonderFood

Injera batter is fermented—traditionally with a starter carried from an earlier batch—then cooked on one side until bubbles open into the soft, absorbent surface known as eyes.

Teff often gives injera its structure, although households also work with other grains and blends. During fermentation, microbes sour the batter and fill it with gas; on the hot griddle those bubbles set into a porous sheet strong enough to carry stews and tender enough to tear by hand. The same surface serves as food, utensil and shared table. A saved starter links today's meal to the last one, making continuity something tasted rather than announced.

InjeraRead card

Q1937

WonderFood

Xochimilco's chinampas are raised fields built from lake sediment and organic matter, threaded by canals and often edged with ahuejote willows that help hold the banks.

Calling chinampas floating gardens hides the labour that makes them stable. Farmers dredge nutrient-rich canal mud onto constructed plots, manage water at the field edge and use rows of slender willows as living reinforcement; the canals also create habitat and temper local conditions. This is agriculture as a negotiated boundary between land and lake, not the conquest of one by the other. Its survival inside Mexico City depends as much on defending water and farming communities as on admiring an ingenious form.

ChinampaRead card

Q1938

WonderFood

Pacific voyagers carried selected breadfruit plants between islands for thousands of years, establishing long-lived food trees and hundreds of locally named cultivars.

A canoe carrying breadfruit carried more than calories. Many prized cultivars had to travel as living shoots or rooted plants, demanding moisture, protection and the confidence that someone would tend them after landfall. Once established, the trees could feed communities for generations within layered agroforestry systems. Their distribution maps a form of navigation measured not only by where people reached, but by the edible futures they deliberately planted there.

BreadfruitRead card

Q1939

StillnessFood

Across Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, cooks roll moistened semolina into grains and steam them, preserving distinct local methods inside a widely shared meal.

Couscous begins before the pot: semolina is moistened, rolled by hand, separated into grains and prepared for steaming, a tactile judgement learned through observation and practice. Broths, vegetables, meats, seasonings and occasions vary across regions and families. Its UNESCO recognition came through a joint nomination by four countries, an unusual act of cultural diplomacy. The dish offers a mature model of belonging—shared deeply, made differently, owned completely by no single border.

CouscousRead card

Q1940

WonderFood

During tempeh fermentation, Rhizopus fungi grow a white network of mycelium through cooked soybeans, binding separate beans into a firm cake while transforming flavour and texture.

Tempeh is often described as fermented soy, but its structure is as important as its flavour. The fungus grows between the beans, its fine filaments making thousands of biological joins while enzymes reshape compounds in the soy. In Java and across Indonesia, makers learned to manage heat, moisture, airflow and inoculum long before the organism had a laboratory name. Fermentation here is neither decay nor mystery; it is a cultivated partnership whose success can be lifted from its wrapper in one piece.

TempehRead card

Q1941

WonderFood

Garum and related Roman sauces were made by salting fish and allowing enzymes and microbes to break the flesh into a savoury liquid traded throughout the empire.

Garum was not one standard recipe but a family of fish sauces and pastes sold in different grades, from everyday seasoning to branded luxury. Salt controlled the fermentation while enzymes in the fish liquefied tissue, concentrating savoury compounds long before anyone named umami. Jars from Pompeii carry painted labels identifying contents and makers; the producer Aulus Umbricius Scaurus even displayed sauce containers in a floor mosaic. The condiment reveals an ancient market already fluent in processing, reputation and packaging.

GarumRead card

Q1942

DriveFood

Cassava contains cyanogenic compounds in varying amounts, so established methods such as peeling, grating, soaking, fermenting, pressing and drying are vital parts of making it safe.

Cassava thrives in difficult conditions and stores useful energy underground, but its roots cannot be treated as a universally ready food. Cyanogenic compounds differ by variety and environment; no single preparation step fits every product. Across Africa, South America and beyond, communities developed multi-stage processes that rupture cells, dissolve or expel compounds and allow volatile cyanide to escape. The staple's reach rests on agricultural resilience and on culinary knowledge precise enough to turn hazard into nourishment.

CassavaRead card

Q1943

StillnessFood

Indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands harvested spring maple sap and concentrated it into sugar long before Europeans arrived, developing the knowledge newcomers later adopted.

Maple sap runs during a narrow swing of freezing nights and milder days, turning weather knowledge into a harvest calendar. Indigenous makers cut or tapped trees, gathered sap in bark containers and concentrated it with heated stones or boiling, producing transportable sugar as well as syrup. European settlers learned from these practices and later introduced metal tools and large-scale equipment. The familiar bottle therefore begins with older expertise: how to read a forest precisely at the moment it changes season.

Maple syrupRead card

Q1946

WonderArt

Indonesian batik makers apply hot wax in lines and dots to resist dye, then repeat waxing, colouring and removal to build patterned cloth through controlled acts of concealment.

Wax does not colour the cloth; it preserves selected ground while dye changes everything exposed. Removing the wax, adding new barriers and dyeing again lets a maker layer decisions that may be almost invisible until the final boil. In Indonesia, motifs and uses accompany life from infant slings to weddings, work, performance and burial, while designs also register centuries of exchange. Batik's surface is therefore both image and process map: every colour records where the cloth was open, and where it was deliberately kept safe.

BatikRead card

Q1947

WonderArt

Asante and Ewe weavers create distinct kente traditions by weaving narrow silk or cotton strips, cutting and arranging them, then sewing the lengths into expansive cloths.

The scale of a finished kente wrapper can hide its modular construction. Long, narrow bands emerge from the loom carrying complex warp and weft designs; joining them demands decisions about rhythm, interruption and alignment across the whole cloth. Asante and Ewe makers have related but different histories, techniques and visual vocabularies, so kente should not be flattened into one code of colour meanings. Its later association with Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-African identity added global political resonance to already specific local arts.

Kente clothRead card

Q1948

WonderArt

Cochineal dye is made by extracting carminic acid from dried female scale insects raised on prickly pear cactus, then using mordants and acidity to create reds from pink to crimson.

Indigenous dyers in the Americas cultivated cochineal and mastered the salts, acids and alkaline additions that make one source yield remarkably different colours. After the Spanish conquest, the concentrated dye became a guarded imperial commodity shipped into European textiles and paintings and onward through global trade. Its brilliance crossed borders; the wealth and power around it did not cross evenly. To find cochineal in an artwork is to find chemistry, skilled cultivation and colonial extraction compressed into colour.

CochinealRead card

Q1949

DriveArt

Faith Ringgold joined painted cloth, quilting and written narrative in story quilts that placed Black family life, history and imagined freedom inside the language of major art.

Ringgold moved beyond the prestige rules of oil painting by working with fabric, sewing, borders and text—forms long diminished as women's work or craft. In Tar Beach, a child flies above a Harlem rooftop and the George Washington Bridge, claiming the city through imagination when social reality withholds control. The written voice around the image does not explain the art; it enlarges who gets to narrate it. Ringgold made the soft edge of a quilt carry arguments sturdy enough for a museum wall.

Faith RinggoldRead card

Q1950

WonderArt

Artisanal Talavera in Puebla and Tlaxcala depends on a linked process of clay preparation, shaping, glazing, pigment work and kiln control transmitted through specialist workshops.

Talavera is often recognised by its luminous surface, but the visible decoration is only one stage in a demanding chain. Clay bodies, wheel or mould, enamel, mineral pigments and firing must behave together; some makers oversee the whole sequence while others inherit one specialism. The Mexican tradition grew through Indigenous knowledge, Spanish ceramic forms and wider trade, a history of contact shaped by unequal power as well as invention. Each workshop keeps a distinct hand inside a shared process.

Artisanal Talavera of Puebla and TlaxcalaRead card

Q1951

WonderArt

Chinese paper-cut artists use scissors, knives or chisels to turn a single sheet into connected motifs for windows, interiors, festivals, weddings and other social occasions.

Every opening must leave enough paper to hold the rest together, so composition is also an exercise in structure. Regional practices range from fine, delicate scenes to bold forms; makers adapt motifs to birthdays, marriage, seasonal festivals, prayer and the architecture of a particular room. The art has often been passed among women from childhood, while contemporary artists also use machines and new media. Its vitality lies in that elasticity: one inexpensive sheet can still carry a highly local world.

Chinese paper cuttingRead card

Q1952

StillnessArt

Arabic calligraphers exploit the script's connected right-to-left forms—stretching, compressing and arranging letters—while controlling line through a cut reed qalam.

The Arabic alphabet's twenty-eight letters change form as they join, giving the calligrapher a system in which proportion and movement can operate inside language. Traditional practice begins with material intelligence: the angle of a cut reed, soot-based ink, prepared paper and a hand trained to repeat a stroke until it carries ease. The same principles have travelled into stone, metal, textiles, type and calligraffiti. Legibility and beauty do not sit on opposite sides; the art keeps negotiating the exact distance between them.

Arabic calligraphyRead card

Q1953

StillnessArt

Armenian khachkars are upright stone steles centred on a carved cross and surrounded by interlaced plant, geometric and figurative motifs, each composition individually worked.

A khachkar may mark worship, remembrance, protection or a bond between secular and sacred life. Craftspeople cut local stone with chisels and fine points, often setting the cross above a sun or wheel of eternity and surrounding it with patterns dense enough to seem woven. Families and master-apprentice lineages transmit methods while leaving room for regional character and individual invention. Repetition supplies the grammar; dignity comes from refusing to make any memorial merely interchangeable.

KhachkarRead card

Q1954

WonderArt

Pacific barkcloth makers strip and beat selected inner bark until the fibres spread into supple sheets, then join, dye, rub, stencil or paint the material for local uses.

Barkcloth is not one pan-Pacific style. Paper mulberry and other plants become materials with different names, textures, designs and social lives across Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, Hawaiʻi, Fiji and many other islands. Beating expands and locks the fibres without weaving; makers may build great sheets from smaller pieces and pattern them with plant dyes, rubbing boards or freehand marks. In some communities cloth accompanies birth, marriage, rank, mourning and exchange, making a tree's inner skin part of the public fabric of life.

BarkclothRead card

Q1956

WonderArt

Etel Adnan moved between poetry, essays, painting, tapestry and accordion-fold books, letting colour and language answer different parts of a life lived across Beirut, Paris and California.

Mount Tamalpais became one of Adnan's enduring subjects, not because she exhausted its appearance but because looking kept changing both mountain and observer. Her small paintings build landscapes from concentrated blocks of colour; her writing lets politics, war, nature and perception move at another tempo. She often worked across languages and geographies without forcing them into a tidy identity. In her hands, translation was not a lesser copy—it was the method by which one reality discovered another medium.

Etel AdnanRead card

Q1957

WonderArt

For many suzanis, a draftswoman drew one design across loosely joined cotton strips, which were separated for relatives to embroider and finally sewn back together.

Suzani derives from a Persian word for needle and names large embroidered textiles associated especially with settled communities in present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. They formed part of a bride's dowry and furnished interiors, their flowers, vines and medallions carrying the time of women working together. Because separate strips could be embroidered simultaneously, motifs sometimes meet imperfectly and neighbouring colours shift at the seam. Those irregularities are not failed finish; they are evidence that one composition was entrusted to several lives.

SuzaniRead card

Q1958

DriveArt

Semiha Berksoy built a seventy-year practice across opera, theatre, cinema, literature and painting, turning self-portraits, stage roles and personal memory into one dramatic visual world.

Berksoy trained in music and visual art, became Türkiye's first woman opera artist and performed in Europe, yet she never treated painting as a secondary career. Her figures arrive frontally and theatrically on canvas, cardboard and bedsheets, surrounded by written names, dates, curtains and memories that make biography part of the set. She painted herself, loved ones and roles she had inhabited until private room and public stage overlapped. The result is not a portfolio of disciplines; it is a life refusing to be divided into departments.

Semiha BerksoyRead card

Q1961

WonderHistory

Marshallese stick charts encoded how ocean swells bend around islands, using curved ribs for wave patterns and cowrie shells or selected intersections for islands.

Marshallese navigators built charts from coconut ribs, fibre and shells, but their subject was not fixed territory. The curves modelled long ocean swells, currents and the disturbances made by islands. Often studied ashore and committed to memory rather than carried at sea, each chart trained a body to feel a moving landscape beneath the canoe.

Marshall Islands stick chartRead card

Q1962

WonderHistory

Al-Idrisi completed the Tabula Rogeriana for Roger II in 1154 after years of comparing written geography with reports gathered from travellers.

At the Norman court in Sicily, al-Idrisi worked across languages, trade routes and rival geographic traditions. The resulting book paired regional maps with descriptions of roads, ports, distances and economies; like much Islamic cartography of its era, its world map placed south at the top. Orientation was a convention, while verification was the ambition.

Tabula RogerianaRead card

Q1963

WonderArt

The Catalan Atlas of 1375 joined nautical charts to cosmology, rulers, caravans and travel lore across six richly illuminated parchment leaves.

Usually attributed to the Majorcan Jewish cartographer Abraham Cresques and his workshop, the atlas moves from calendar and cosmology into a mapped world. Accurate Mediterranean coastlines share parchment with Mansa Musa, Silk Road caravans and creatures drawn from travellers' reports. It borrows the coastal precision of portolan charts while functioning as an illuminated courtly portrait of what lay beyond sight.

Catalan AtlasRead card

Next reading modeDriveIdeas for sustained work.