“My thesis project "Specufabula” explores Western knowledge systems found in scientific and museological histories. The term "Specufabula" references a neologism posed by Helen Palmer in her article “Speculative Taxonomies”. It refers to speculative fabulation that can be applied to taxonomic systems in order for new worlds and materialisms to be imagined in the context of diverse epistemes and transversality: a framework which is the main pillar in my investigative project. I engage with a speculative approach to system-making through the methodology and content of collection. Through installational and printed materials I reference archival, scientific and museological practices and aesthetics while injecting written poetics and object symbolism into the rigidity of their classification systems in order to investigate how knowledge is codified within them. My formal research process investigates object-oriented ontologies, museological history and its colonial baggage, scientific forms of knowledge production, and decolonial approaches to re-inventing knowledge systems. In order to speak to the entwined frameworks of Western museum and colonial histories, I mobilize their aesthetics. Historic methods of collection and categorization—the curiosity cabinet, taxonomic nomenclature, the card catalogue, the field guide—became aesthetic and conceptual sites. My combined background in sculpture and printmaking enables me to approach historic aesthetics materially as well as conceptually. Inspired by the taxonomic history of scientific illustration, I investigate my own collected natural objects through illustrative print mediums, lithography and intaglio. The central purpose of the "Specufabula" is to engage directly with my collected natural objects and to investigate the systems through which knowledge is codified. Adjacent conversations about colonialism are tied into the work by the use of Western historic aesthetics of collection and display. Art as an imaginative medium allows me to confront the dichotomies enforced by Western scientific ideology. Considering how objects are decontextualized and codified through collection and subsequent display, I use that power to my advantage in order to fabricate my own world within a collection. In my work, contexts are imagined and recreated through methods of accumulation, representation, and categorization. I re-present the colonial Western ways of knowing by re-invigorating them with the injection of other ways of knowing—through poetics, through sustainable collection methodologies, and through an object-as-subject approach. My work therefore references the familiar in order to gesture towards the speculative. ”