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Or if you are in London visit the Science Museum, where artist-in-residence
Martha Fleming has gleaned wonderful objects from throughout the collections.
Her sources range from objects on display, to unseen treasures, filing cards and
photographs. She presents them in new and extraordinary ways in Atomism &
Animism. Looked at closely, a case of books turns out to be a scattering of
sample trays for minerals, a set of logs, binoculars and more. The book, you
see, embodies knowledge and thus book-like containers became a popular choice
for housing scientific instruments. Fleming pursues other themes, such as
circles and ellipses, to stunning effect: a cat’s cradle of a mathematical model
shows a conical section; its neighbours include cone-shaped medical sieves and
weights—all jostling for attention. And she’s laid a trail of
objects—from Wilberforce’s slave ship to forgotten mathematicians and
their knitted topological models (they look like a child’s mittens)—in
ordinary display cases throughout the museum, thereby shedding intriguing light
on the rest of the objects.