From Within Biology

Linnean Society of London

Burlington House

21 Jun - 6 July 2011

 

The Society's library is a contextually significant place in which to have had work shown. This treasure house of texts and illustrations is a place where the tension between the works' alieness and familiarity becomes instantly resolved as synchronous aspects of the imagination and empirical knowledge.

In the accompanying lecture I gave at the Linnean Society, I looked at links between biological thinking and art through the lens of the writing of Agnes Arber. She was a botanist who in the final decade of her life turned to philosophical writings. Her profound insights into how things are joined together are of great relevance today in articulating how art and science offer different perspectives on the same ineffable landscape.