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PETRI dishes have rarely looked so beautiful, transformed into art. In Vanitas (in a Petri dish), Suzanne Anker selected objects ranging from butterfly wings, mushrooms and mosses to metal and glass beads to demonstrate how the real can be combined with the artificial 鈥� much as it is in synthetic biology.
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Anker was inspired by a type of still-life painting called vanitas that was popular in the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries. The artists started from the premise that earthly goods, pleasures and pursuits were transitory and worthless, as the Vulgate, the main Latin version of the Bible, says: vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas, or vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
This symbolic form of art captured the shortness of life, the futility of earthly pleasures and the inevitability of death through such objects as skulls, rotten fruit and hourglasses.
Vanitas鈥榮 micro-worlds also reflect how life is short-lived, literally 鈥渋n vain鈥�: the motifs of decay coupled with nature鈥檚 abundance warn against excessive materialism, says Anker.
But the new work also highlights the growing scope of the biological sciences and the way life can now be morphed into strange and unnatural forms. The humble Petri dish is a key addition, a symbol of the science we use to redesign and engineer organisms with new traits to carry out specific functions 鈥� or sometimes, just because we can.
鈥淪cience is nature through a lens, allowing us to uncover unseen worlds,鈥� says Anker. 鈥淎rt, too, reveals what is unseen, by turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.鈥�
