Kim Polgreen 23rd September 2021
Monday had to be the most fun I’ve ever had at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. I joined the Ashmolean’s Secondary Educator Clare Cory, woodland ecologist Dr Keith Kirby, and entomologist Dr Liam Crowley to look for nature in the art works and objects. We spent an hour and half on a voyage of nature discovery: in the Dutch still life gallery identifying insects, looking at the plants in John Inchbold’s English pastoral paintings, in the Pre-History gallery discussing how long it takes to cut down a large tree with a hand stone axe (several “long” days!), in the Silk Road exhibition where we discussed how wasps make paper from wood and silk worms prefer White Mulberry to Black Mulberry bushes, and passing through the stringed instruments discussing where the best wood for making violins comes from.
What is that flower / bug??
Clare and I are collaborating with Sarah Lloyd at the Natural History Museum to develop learning resources for the new GCSE in Natural History - a new qualification intended to connect young people with the natural world and understand human culture through the lens of the natural world. (It is hoped that the GCSE will be available for teaching from September 2023, and we hope to be supporting teacher training from 2022 and teaching the GCSE as an extracurricular subject from 2023.) The purpose of this visit was to seek insights related to nature, and connections with human culture.
My favourite insights from our discussions were -
The insects in the Jan van Kessel paintings are remarkably accurate for their time, but the dragonflies are holding their wings in a position that they never do in life - showing that the artist painted them from dead specimens - totally logical if you have ever even tried to take a photo of a dragonfly!
Since nature is used as decoration and often as symbolism in art, artists’ depictions of nature are generally not “accurate”. For example, artists might put species together that would never be together in the same place or at the same time of year (although Liam did tell us a wonderful story of having helped to date a painting by identifying insect species within it). This wonderful video from the Ashmolean discusses how a naturalistic painting by van Kessel actually contains fruits from different seasons, “stock” paintings were used in other paintings at a later date, and different insects carried cultural meanings.
Some significant human cultural advances such as silk, paper (and the understanding of gravity) have been made by people who spent time outside and noticed what was happening in nature.
Our next steps are to turn these insights into some fun resources to help teachers, students and parents connect art, culture and nature.