This project will explore the relationships between scientific and aesthetic responses to the objects in the Natural History Collection, as a site for the production of knowledge about the natural world.
A blindworm bleached and suspended in a spirit jar; a wax scale model of a fish brain on a turned ebony handle; a calculation of the mass in cubic miles of salt in the world’s oceans written in a careful copperplate hand on a glass lantern slide: these objects are now distanced from modern scientific approaches by perhaps a century, and now seem strangely poetic. Each specimen is a fragment of ‘the wild’ that became ‘science’ and is now ‘history’.
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