On a recent visit to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, I found some brilliant examples of SciArt that I just had to share with you. These artworks have all been inspired by bacteria! Though it’s not ‘bacteria art’ , like I have mentioned in my previous post. There was intricate glasswork, a ‘Beautiful Bacteria’ community project, and what I particularly enjoyed was the cleverly created ‘Crocheted Colonies’ by artist Elin Thomas (as shown in cover photo).
Take a look at their work here:
Glass Microbiology
There was also some fascinating glasswork on display by award-winning artist, Luke Jerram. He has been developing a Glass Microbiology series since 2004, and these two examples were on loan from Wellcome Collection in London. Just look how detailed and delicate they are!
Luke originally began to make glass sculptures of viruses , rather than of bacteria. On his website, it states that the glass sculptures were
“made to contemplate the global impact of each disease, the artworks are created as alternative representations of viruses to the artificially coloured imagery received through the media. In fact, viruses have no colour as they are smaller than the wavelength of light. By extracting the colour from the imagery and creating jewel-like beautiful sculptures in glass, a complex tension has arisen between the artworks’ beauty and what they represent.”
“His transparent and colourless glassworks consider how the artificial colouring of scientific microbiological imagery, affects our understanding of these phenomena… If some images are coloured for scientific purposes, and others altered simply for aesthetic reasons, how can a viewer tell the difference? How many people believe viruses are brightly coloured? Are there any colour conventions and what kind of ‘presence’ do pseudocoloured images have that ‘naturally’ coloured specimens don’t? How does the choice of different colours affect their reception?”
I was thoroughly impressed.
Beautiful Bacteria
A museum project brought together a group of school students, a research scientist and an artist to explore the patterns, textures and forms of bacteria (see image below). They produced 3 large puppets inspired by the many shapes and forms that bacteria take.
I love all the textures and colours that they have used. I can definitely see the aspects of bacterial form in them too. Such as the corkscrewed wool and the tie wraps that look like they could be flagella. Or the clumps of pom-poms that look like they could be a colony of spherically shaped bacteria.
I wish I could have had this task when I was studying biology at school! Very creative! Also what a fantastic way to teach and to learn about the different forms that a bacteria cell can take. I’m sure the lessons were much more memorable than reading from a textbook!
Finally, There was also a giant inflatable E.coli installation hanging above the main court that I thought looked like some cool microbiology version of zorbing. Similar to the glasswork, it was colourless. This, along with the other bacterial artworks really help visitors to the museum to visualise the 3D shape of a bacteria cell. Especially this giant E.coli – you can’t miss it!
