The next Fieldwork involved an electric car being driven along the A40 with flypaper attached to a screen on its roof and number plate to collect flying insects. Stopping at regular intervals to remove insects, the video footage shows members of the team picking off the squashed bugs with tweezers.
Indeed, as most of these flies, beetles, wasps, aphids and other specimens were rather disfigured from colliding with the vehicle, the only way to identify most of them accurately was by looking at their DNA. One interesting point highlighted by this is the race being run by scientists and taxonomists to record the genetic characteristics of as many species as possible. This database of DNA can then be used in conservation, even of species as yet unknown or unnamed.
Some of the spoils of the final Fieldwork, from the River Thames, are on display in a polytunnel. Here, human artefacts and the animal kingdom collide, with far more deflated footballs and plastic bottles, all sorted and assembled, than fish, eels, mud snails and crabs.
More interestingly, the study turned up the fifth ever seahorse found in the river, and lots of pieces of broken clay pipes thrown out from riverside pubs by 17th and 18th century smokers.
Many art projects that try to emulate the language and imagery of science fall far from the mark, but Dion, admittedly fascinated by this modern paradigm, succeeds by playing a humble role, giving the stage to the researchers themselves, their methodologies and workspaces.
“Where Linnaeus democratised the study of plants, so Mark Dion popularises the appreciation of and fascination with nature,” says Bergit Arends, contemporary arts curator at the NHM.
“Through Dion’s gentle questioning of how science works, we have been allowed to reconsider ourselves and to play.”