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A Museum of Modern Nature

Credit: Garden gnome - Julie Carr, image courtesy of Wellcome Collection

Something old, something new, a museum of modern nature, borrowed from you. A Museum of Modern Nature is a crowdsourced exhibition that tells stories of our relationship to the natural world.

From a hand painted garden gnome passed through three generations of the same family, to the asthma inhaler that sparked a career in environmentalism or the tattoo inspired by phytoplankton, each object tells a unique and personal story. Together the diverse items on display provide a collective snapshot of how we think about nature in the 21st century, and explore how our behaviours and values are bound up with the future of the planet.

The objects were selected by a small team of people, including a dairy farmer, a horticultural scientist and a plant medicine shaman, who all work with nature in their daily lives. Their objects, from binoculars, to a jar of their own milk teeth and a jar of country air, will also be on show.

The exhibition also features an art work created in collaboration between students and artist Verity-Jane Keefe. A contemporary take on a museum diorama, the work is the result of a series of workshops and explores what nature means for boys who live in inner London, and what it might look like in the future.

A major digital project, Sharing Nature, runs alongside the exhibition to showcase images and ideas suggested by the public from across the country and beyond. Using a different theme each week, each and every one of these digital offerings are displayed in the gallery as well as online forming a broad picture of our everyday relationship with nature in 2017.

This exhibition brings to a conclusion a year-long exploration of our relationship with the natural world started with the exhibition Making Nature: How we see animals.

Museum of Modern Nature is open until 8 October 2017 at the Wellcome Collection.

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