If you like bright colours and engaging light installations, you'll probably stop for a while in front of the windows of the Wellcome Trust in London and look at them with a mixture of admiration and curiosity.
Six different structures forming intriguing Art Deco style chandeliers, geometrical figures or molecular organisms occupy the windows, looking from far away as if they were made with solid and compact materials. Yet, if you come closer, you will discover that these "chandeliers" are actually assemblages of objects borrowed from scientific laboratories.
Entitled "Tools of the Trade" (2015) the six installations by Stuart Haygarth are indeed made with plastic and glass laboratory equipment used in scientific research and experiments.
Haygarth mainly creates these compositions employing discarded materials for unique designs that quite often incorporate hundreds of ordinary relics from our everyday lives (you may have seen some of his installations at various design events, exhibitions, galleries and museums).
The materials employed in this case were chosen for their aesthetic quality, consistence and purpose and, when you dissect each installation, you discover there is a lot to learn about these scientific tools.
The laboratory apparatus includes indeed vials (or phials/flacons), that is small glass or plastic containers used to store medication, including liquids, powders or capsules; pipettes used to transport a measured volume of liquid; petri dishes, that is shallow cylindrical glasses or plastic lidded dishes, typically used by biologists to culture cells such as bacteria or small mosses; Buchner funnels, usually employed to proceed the filtration more quickly than simply allowing the solvent to drain through the filter medium under gravity.
Haygarth also picked a large number of different flasks: from the Erlenmeyer Flask with a flat bottom, a conical body and a cylindrical neck, that allows contents to be mixed by agitation without risk of spillage, and the Kjeldahl Flask, employed in the distillation of mixtures thanks to its narrow neck with a ground glass joint, to round-bottom flasks (used in chemical or biochemical work, the round bottom allows more uniform heating or boiling of a liquid), fractionating flasks (used in distilation of liquid mixtures to separate the mixture into its component parts or fractions, based on the difference of volatilities) and volumetric flasks (a flask calibrated to contain a precise volume at a particular temperature, ideal for precise dilutions and preparation of standard solutions).
Other pieces include NMR tubes (a thick glass-walled rube used to contain samples in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy) and calcium chloride U-Tubes (employed in moisture-sensitive operations; they are normally filled with calcium chloride desiccant, allowing positive pressure to escape without sucking in any moisture to the reaction).
"My work revolves around everyday objects, collected in large quantities, categorised and presented in such a way that they are given new meaning. It is about banal and overlooked objects gaining new significance," a quote by Haygarth explains on one of the windows.
The installations invite indeed passersby to think about the sensual shapes and surfaces of some of these objects, suggesting them new uses and perspectives on these functional scientific objects. The pieces also show clear connections with the diverse collection of crafted objects and laboratory apparatus that Henry Wellcome accumulated throughout the years, proving that science can be a wonderful inspiration for many creative disciplines.
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