23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 29Worlds in a dish
Photographer Suzanne Anker
PETRI dishes have rarely looked
so beautiful, transformed into art.
In Vanitas (in a Petri dish), Suzanne
Anker selected objects ranging
from butterfly wings, mushrooms
and mosses to metal and glass
beads to demonstrate how the
real can be combined with the
artificial – much as it is in
synthetic biology.
Anker was inspired by a
type of still-life painting called
vanitas that was popular in the
Netherlands in the 16th and
17th centuries. The artists started
from the premise that earthly
goods, pleasures and pursuits
were transitory and worthless,
as the Vulgate, the main Latin
version of the Bible, says: vanitas
vanitatum, omnia vanitas, or
vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
This symbolic form of art
captured the shortness of life,
the futility of earthly pleasures
and the inevitability of death
through such objects as skulls,
rotten fruit and hourglasses.
Vanitas’s micro-worlds also
reflect how life is short-lived,
literally “in vain”: the motifs
of decay coupled with nature’s
abundance warn against excessive
materialism, says Anker.
But the new work also
highlights the growing scope
of the biological sciences and
the way life can now be morphed
into strange and unnatural forms.
The humble Petri dish is a key
addition, a symbol of the science
we use to redesign and engineer
organisms with new traits to
carry out specific functions – or
sometimes, just because we can.
“Science is nature through
a lens, allowing us to uncover
unseen worlds,” says Anker.
“Art, too, reveals what is unseen,
by turning the ordinary into
the extraordinary.” ❚
Gege Li