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Science and Art

Darwin2009: Spiral of Life Mural Series

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Spiral of Life VI: Life Stories

Children's Museum of Pittsburgh PA
Thanks to Angela Seals, Lois Winslow, Penny Lodge and the staff at the Museum Photographer: Josh Gates of Boxwood Photography

Performance and public interaction were funded by the F.I.N.E. Artist Residency Series, funded by the Fine Foundation, awarded to Joana Ricou.

Reading a Sculpture, instead of a Book

"Bacteria and Archaea existed for a long time alone on the Earth, until one day something special happened. Feel the branches, what do you think happened? (They come together or fuse) We think that an archaea ate a bacteria but the bacteria didn't die! See the drawing – the grey archaea ate the bacteria, and they started living together!  This created a new kind of cell (the blue cell). This new kind of cell was very different, it has almost little organs inside and even a kind of skeleton!"

This iteration of the Spiral of Life was created for the audience of the Children's Museum, where visitors can be as young as 3 years old (and sometimes younger). The original Spiral was simplified further and built as a 3-D sculpture that doubles as an interactive storytelling stage. The branches are marked with clear labels that identify major evolutionary steps and help the visitors decipher its meaning.

Storytelling performances were held on the sculpture, where kids were challenged to explore the sculpture, find and interpret symbols. The story puts a face to all the branches, and introduces kids to the idea that most of life is INVISIBLE (primarily bacteria, and archaea and protists), and that ALL life is related.

"All living things come from one great-great-great-greatx100 grandparent - we call it LUCA! LUCA means the Last Universal Common Ancestor. All things alive today are the great-great-great—greatx100-grandkids of LUCA! And that includes – (naming each group while pointing at each set of branches) and ME, and YOU and YOU and YOU-- So all living things are like very distant cousins. Trees, birds, worms, even bacteria, are all part of YOUR family, our family, the family of all living things."

Before the story is over, we discussed how life changes overtime, and how life continues to evolve.

THE PROCESS

The Spiral was further simplified for this instance. The taxonomic groups were adjusted to reflect meaningful and discrete evolutionary steps. Like the plant evolution example mentioned before, learning the term "bryophitas" is much less significant than understanding that all algae used to live in the ocean until the first plants started to live on land.

Simplified diagram. Click for larger picture.

To create the Spiral, a rough blueprint was drawn on an 8ft x 8 ft piece of canvas. A structure of foam was hot glued and sewn together. The foam was covered with richly textured fabric donated by J's Fine Fabrics, a downtown business. The labels were printed and iron tranfered onto T-shirt fabric before being glued to the Spiral.

Different activities were held in the Studio for visitors to interact with the materials and processes of the sculpture and with the content.

FOAM SCULPTURES

Visitors were encouraged to build their own sculptures next to the space where the Spiral was built. Kids were curious about the foam, how each kind was very different in texture, density and brittleness and how that informed the shapes we could create. Kids got to experiment with the different sponges, learning how to use the different qualities of each to create shapes.

MAKE A PLANT

The evolution of plants can be understood as a series of four steps or groups: (1) appearance of plants on land, (2) plants with vessels, (3) with seeds and (4) with flowers.

Playing with this simplification, visitors were encouraged to create plants from the available materials that reflected the steps. Materials available included string knotted to look like roots, pipe cleaners that were used as stems, cut-outs of leaves and flowers, and real seeds. Inspirational images illustrated each step, showing for example the vessels on a leaf.

FABRIC COLLAGE

The fabric was donated by local business "J's Fine Fabrics." The fabric was rich, textured and available in many colors. Kids and parents had the chance to make their own compositions, using each element for their color or pattern.

CELL PAINTINGS

A series of molding shapes in foam were found with lovely cell-like shapes. These "stamps" were made available in the Painting area of the Studio. Inspirational images of different kinds of shapes were attached to the easels as prompts.

On the left, Joana Ricou creates an example; on the right, a piece created by a 4 year old visitor.