Small Worlds: Museum of the History of Science, Oxford

4:04pm Wednesday 24th October 2007

Occasionally a museum houses exhibits that are so small they can't been fully appreciated unless they are viewed under a microscope. This makes them difficult to mount in a display. If they were laid out alongside a microscope they could only be observed by one person at a time.

The Museum of the History of Science, in Broad Street, has overcome this problem by inviting artist Heather Barnett and performance poet Will Holloway to create a representation of one of their collections, using poetry and art.

The exhibits at the centre of the museum's Small Worlds show is a cabinet of slides collected between 1860 and 1930, at a time when microscopy was a fashionable hobby.

The slides, which were donated to the museum two years ago, contain a variety of specimens such as fungi, plant parts, animal and human tissue samples, insects and - strangest of all - a miniaturised photograph of a hunting expedition. Heather and Will's task was to help the visitor discover these specimens in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways, including plankton-patterned curtains, animations and audio poems.

Their aim when planning their strategies, Heather explained, was to take the audience on a journey. They have played with ideas of scale and vision. They have also come up different ways of making the invisible visible. The relationship between the small worlds of miscroscopy and the macrospic world is celebrated too. The result is an exciting, accessible exhibition which really does give people the experience of being under the microscope while visiting a show that aims for the grand scale and achieves it.

For a full list of exciting events and workshops organised to link with the Small Worlds exhibition, which runs until April 2008, go to www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/smallworlds