Evening view event for one night only:

Took place on 15th July 2008

5:30 -7:30pm

Varndean School, Brighton (location details here)

An entire school became a major conceptual artwork for one evening only, featuring installations, interventions and performances by Anna Dumitriu and science students at Varndean School in Brighton .

As part of 'Normal Flora', her major ongoing art project about our sublime microbial world, artist Anna Dumitriu has taken over an entire secondary school in Sussex in the largest event in the science-art programme to date.

The giant one evening only art event was open to the public and took over Varndean School in Sussex, involving students and staff. The art works are all based on the laboratory findings of bacteria, moulds and yeasts collected in the school and include: digital works, performances, interventions, bacterially inspired food and music.

Anna Dumitriu is an award-winning artist with an international reputation. Recently selected for the prestigious European-wide e-MobiLArt project, she has worked closely with the science students at Varndean for this event. The students took swabs of microbes all over the school - from the drinking fountain to the books in the library - these were then taken to a lab, placed in agar jelly and cultured. Working closely with Anna Dumitriu, the students then created artworks inspired by the microbes. The project goes far beyond a typical school art project and stands as a major work in its own right. These art installations set out to reveal the secret beauty of the microbial eco-system that surrounds us.

The project is funded by Brighton and Hove City Council. See press coverage here.

Project Development

In collaboration with gifted and talented science students at Varndean School in Brighton and the Head of Science John Lamb, Anna Dumitriu has developed a series of new of artworks. Students walked in and around the school building looking at the spaces and objects there in new ways and developing ideas that are used in the final works. Samples of the microbial flora (bacteria and moulds) that will be the inspiration for the work. Thanks to microbiologist Dr Simon Park (Surrey University) and students from Brighton and Sussex Medical School for there help with this project also.

A few days after plating up the samples on agar (Columbia Blood Agar and Sabouraud’s) a diverse range of flora (bacteria, moulds and yeasts) was grown, see photos below. These were ‘Gram’s stained’ (see the process of Gram’s staining below) and photographed using a high power microscope (with help from Dr John Paul).

To open up the students’ creativity they participated in a performance exercise and a workshop to make very quick installations, interventions and performances and then present back to the group the ideas behind what they made. A few images are shown below.

The series of new artworks will be displayed throughout the school building on 15th July 2008. See images here.