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Hi everyone! This is just a brief post to share some exciting recent happenings from the 3D Pollen Project, highlighting a few exhibitions and one mini expedition…
Exhibitions
If you’re in the UK and you want to see 3D pollen models in the wild, there has never been a better time! This summer you can find three great exhibitions around the country which all use the models to help share the amazing world of pollen with visitors.
The first one I want to highlight is The Wonder Of Pollen, at RHS Garden Harlow Carr in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. This exhibition was planned as a central part of my Knowledge Exchange Fellowship, so has been in the works a while. It’s been great to work with Dan, Kirstie and Ruth from the garden’s education and outreach teams, as well as Rob Marchant at York and Graham from 24 Design to put the exhibition together.
You can enjoy the exhibition free with garden entry. As you explore the gardens, you’ll come across several boards highlighting some of the stories pollen reveals about the natural world and the sciences which study it. Each board features a tactile 3D model and a beautiful microscopic image of the pollen in the story, courtesy of the team behind PalDat. The RHS team has also developed a workshop for primary schools around pollination, which you can book onto if you want to play with some of the 72 3D pollen models they now have! The exhibition has been running all summer and is due to finish on the 1st of September, so go soon if you want to see it (for this year, at least)!
A second exhibition I’ve been fortunate enough to contribute to – though to a much smaller extent – is Bees: A Story Of Survival at the World Museum in Liverpool. It’s one of the most amazing exhibitions I’ve ever seen in a museum. It’s the brainchild of the artist Wolfgang Buttress and his studio, who created The Hive installation at Kew Gardens among other fascinating things. Wolfgang and his team got in touch to discuss ways of representing pollen in interesting new ways, eventually deciding to etch my 3D pollen data into solid glass blocks. This technique shows off the grain’s shape and structure like no other approach I’ve seen, and it’s just one of the visually stunning ways the exhibition delves into the worlds of bees. Bees: A Story Of Survival is in Liverpool until May 2025 (when it heads off on a global tour!), so do go and see it if you can – you won’t be disappointed!
There’s another, perhaps more unexpected, exhibition where you can find 3D pollen models this summer: Birds: Brilliant And Bizarre at the Natural History Museum in London. One part of this exhibition uses 3D pollen models to help communicate the environmental changes caused by the catastrophic end-Cretaceous mass extinction event ca. 66 million years ago. These models aren’t actually from my collection, but it was great to be involved in some of the discussions around planning the exhibition and how 3D pollen might be able to contribute to it.
An expedition
In June, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to southern Brazil to advance a different element of my project. My fellowship is all about knowledge exchange – not just helping non-experts access scientific knowledge, as with the exhibitions, but also trying to bring communities into the scientific process and share their knowledge with researchers.
For several years now I’ve been hoping to use 3D pollen models in conversations about palaeoecology with communities connected with my PhD research. A key question in my thesis was about how southern Brazil’s Indigenous people shaped the region’s Araucaria Forests before European colonisation. There have been some interesting results, but I think it’s important that this work includes contemporary Indigenous groups, such as the Kaingang – after all, this research concerns the long connections between them, their ancestors and the ecosystems they have lived among for millennia.
First of all, I believe there needs to be ‘knowledge repatriation’ – taking results out of the English-speaking scientific world and sharing them back to the communities. This might then lead to knowledge co-creation – Indigenous people understand their lifeways and ecosystems in very different ways to researchers like me, so might be able to shed useful and important light on past human-environment relationships. My hope is that tangible, interesting 3D pollen models can help facilitate these conversations by bringing palaeo research to life.
This visit was all about laying the foundations for this work. It was an enormous privilege to be invited on to three Terras Indígenas – Aldeia Kondá, Toldo Chimbangue and Toldo Imbú – in the course of the week to learn a bit about how the Kaingang understand the natural environment and to talk a bit about my work. I’m hugely grateful to the communities who welcomed me, as well as to everyone who helped make the visit such a success: Wilmar D’Angelis and Juracilda Veiga in the very beginning, Rosane Meneghetti and Fernanda Zanini de Moura in the Assessoria de Relações Nacionais e Internacionais, and Cláudia Battestin, Mirian Carbonera and Andre Onghero throughout. I’m looking forward to continuing to build these relationships and conversations over the months and years ahead!
Oli
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