Courtesy the Museum of the History of Science

Exhibition Preview: Small Worlds at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, until April 6 2008.

The current exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford is combining the worlds of art and science by delving into the museum’s incredible collection of specimen slides from the late 1800s and early 20th century.

The cabinet of 10,000 slides that forms the basis of the exhibition, ‘Small Worlds – the art of the invisible’, was donated to the museum in 2005. Its contents were collected between 1860 and 1930, when microscopy was a fashionable hobby.

Courtesy the Museum of the History of Science

Artist Heather Barnett, in collaboration with performance poet Will Holloway, has been inspired by the intricate images that appear through the microscope as well as the age when the specimens were collected, to create microbe-patterned curtains and wallpaper, animations and audio poems.

The specimens include classic material such as plant parts, human and animal tissues, but also less usual samples such as a miniaturised photo of a hunting expedition. Many are displayed in gilt and wooden frames, evoking the spirit of microscopy in Victorian and Edwardian times.

“We want to take the audience on a journey, playing with ideas of scale, vision, different ways of making the invisible visible, and the relationship between the small world of microscopy and the macroscopic world,” says Heather. “We really want to give people the experience of being under the microscope.”

See the exhibition website at
www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/smallworlds.

This is an exhibition preview - have you been to see this show? Why not let us know what you think?