Nature and human nature intersect in a crowdsourced exhibition – New Scientist

Human-made objects reflect our connection to nature

Thomas Farnetti; Steven Pocock/Wellcome

By Boyd Tonkin

If you fear that urban living has astroturfed over our sensitivity to nature, trek to Euston Road in London. Each of the 56 crowdsourced exhibits in the Wellcome Collections Museum of Modern Nature comes with an audio commentary by the person who submitted it. These are worth a listen.

Take the slice of artificial turf presented by Jenny Bettenson, who works on a city farm. At first glance, its an invitation to contemplate what the word natural might mean in societies increasingly removed from wildness. (The writer Robert Macfarlane once observed that, as childrens knowledge of plant and animal vocabulary shrinks, its goodbye to the blackberry, hello to the BlackBerry.) Hold on, though: that patch of plastic grass not only mimics the concrete-covered real thing. Proper plants kale, nasturtiums, even grass itself have begun to sprout amid its phoney blades.

Curator Honor Beddard and her team of selectors which includes a dairy farmer, a mountaineer, a park manager, a horticultural scientist and a plant medicine shaman have chosen items to tell a story about their contributors relationship with nature. Ideas of nostalgia, loss and threat abound, from Elizabeth Shucks paired photos of the same location in the 1950s and 1980s, in which a farm is replaced by a motorway, to David Cahill Rootss synthetic toy chick. You can draw a line through this show that leads from plenty and intimacy to pollution and alienation. But you will not have covered all the territory.

This gathering of found objects and crafted artefacts, mementos, relics and fetishes, speaks softly yet insistently about resilience and ingenuity. These everyday treasures honour and cherish nature. Some choices are deliberately mundane. Theres a lentil-sorting sieve brought from Bangladesh, and hand-carved spoons from a felled silver birch. Others stress the mimetic capacity of crafted objects, from the fish-shaped paper knife made from brass shell casings in the trenches of the first world war, to the conceptual body art of Kelli Powlings phytoplankton-themed tattoo.

Thomas Farnetti; Steven Pocock/Wellcome

In the shape of actual or depicted flowers, leaves, branches and creatures, fragments of autobiography find expression. If the exhibition needed a signature quotation, it might come from William Wordsworths ode Intimations of Immortality: To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Not too deep for laughter, though. Whatever can Stephen Halls nerdily arranged rows of toy cars, colour-coded to form a spectrum, have to do with modern nature? Hall, who as a kid collected beetles in Australia, began to buy model motors for his son, then for himself. So these plastic automobiles evoke not only the fondly remembered Coleoptera of childhood, but the principle of collecting and classifying itself.

Semioticians would enjoy, as it were, a field day at the Wellcome. These objects run the gamut of every imaginable index, icon and symbol for the natural world from a barometer and a juice carton to a thermos flask and primatologist Shenaz Khimjis paper stack of statistical data about black-headed night monkeys.

Some of the choices seem charmingly naive, though Julie Carrs garden gnome has a touching family backstory. Some John Cockrams oxygen cylinder, for instance feel clever to the point of Tate Modern sophistication.

Ben Gilbert/Wellcome

Just as thought-provoking, in their gnarled and knobbly way, are the scary weapons constructed out of wood, string and concrete by Felix, Vito and Gulliver Wayman-Thwaites (aged, respectively, 7, 7, and 2 and three-quarters). Very Lord of the Flies. One of the Wayman-Thwaiteses explains that, in its pre-militarised state, his stick had a bug living in it but its dead now.

Whole tomes of eco-philosophy have arisen from such insights.

A Museum of Modern Nature runs at the Wellcome Collection, London, until 8 October

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Nature and human nature intersect in a crowdsourced exhibition - New Scientist