, Francis Crick Institute, London, to 1 December
AS EUROPE’s premier biomedical enterprise, there is a lot riding on how far the UK’s multi-million-pound Crick Institute can push the frontiers. Less obviously but equally importantly, there is also a lot riding on how well it handles its engagement with the public, through lectures, exhibitions and sci-art collaborations.
Crick’s first approach to the latter is Deconstructing Patterns, a show where commissioned artists worked closely with the institute’s researchers to explore patterns at the microscopic level. Perhaps wisely, the exhibition is framed as a conversation between art and science. In the right hands, this leads to good art – literally in the case of artist Helen Pynor.
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She has made an astonishing film – Development of the Visual Circuit of Drosophila melanogaster in Three Acts: Larvae l; Pupae l; Pupae ll – of some very special hands (pictured). They belong to Iris Salecker, head of the Crick’s visual circuit assembly laboratory. They are eloquent, talking science in an excitingly kinaesthetic way as they describe the complex series of events during the development of the brain circuits responsible for vision in the fruit fly.
According to Salecker, research is “only just starting” to get to grips with the fly’s eye, part of the challenge posed by pioneering neuroscientist Santiago RamÓn y Cajal when he said: “The complexity of the insect retina is something stupendous, disconcerting and without precedents in other animals.”
Pynor and Salecker formed a close bond while the artist was embedded in the lab. Watching Salecker talk, Pynor was struck by the power and precision of her hands filling important gaps in the language of “describing” what is an essentially 3D process.
Pynor’s second commission, Random precision_Countless intimate acts, also draws on that experience. To help her grasp the spatial complexities, she built 3D wax models of the fly’s optic nerve, photographed them, added filament-like structures to suggest neural connections as well as idealised clouds, and encased the result in acrylic. It is hung high, just the right tone for a complex, sculptural work.
Another commission, A New Music: Making Sense of the Noise, a sound installation by Chu-Li Shewring and Sarah Howe, also intrigues even if the components don’t entirely disappear in the making. Standing in white pods hung from the ceiling, we are on a journey. There is an assortment of watery noises, white noise, voices repeating the letters A, T, C, G (the DNA bases and the stuff of life) or chatting about the search for patterns from simple code.
Sound artist Shewring wanted to explore noise and how we find understanding – or in the case of the genome, a pattern – as a way to interpret what we see or hear. Howe’s poem A New Music is woven into the mix, from which, somehow, sense emerges. Among its memorable lines, she evokes a “biological Bletchley” and “archaeologists of cancer… searching for the point a mangled chromosome went wrong”.
“What emerges are the very different, pervasive effects of immersion in each other’s culture”
At the other end of the show, the kids are less reverent but clearly alright. A group of them called KaleiKo made a movie, drawing on the help of Nate Goehring. He is head of Crick’s polarity and patterning networks lab, which studies nematodes.
The result, Selection, is a surreal tale about a worker who breaks out of work’s machine-like conformity to find a better fate. It is KaleiKo’s response to Goehring’s briefing about uniformity, breaking symmetry and cell fate – the process by which a cell takes on an identity or function. And it is fun.
But what really emerges from the show are the very different, pervasive effects of immersion in each other’s culture. And that can only be a good thing.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Showing and telling”
