With a biologist as curator and an artist as assistant curator, the Nature Lab uniquely combines art and science. Housing an extensive natural history collection, specimens, live animals and plants, and a study room/reference library, the lab provides a richly textured environment for the exploration of connections between art, design and nature.

Check out Etsy’s video:

View the full article here and visit RISD for more info.

Love the subtle beauty, attention to detail, and elegant texture.

More great works by Lila Ruby King.

Works on paper and jewellery in glass.silver.wood.

GOTTA HAVE HEART PRINT
Black ink silkscreen on 100% recycled tan paper
11 x 17″
$18

From orkposters.com via in such a world.

High quality, an affordable purchase, and a wonderful addition to my collection.

What is most striking about these ads is their visual and ideological resemblance to war posters, characterized by stark, intense graphics, bold colours, emotional appeal and such emphatic slogans as, “Don’t Fear Cancer, Fight It!” or “The only safe weapons against cancer are surgery, x-rays, radium.”

Anthony Velonis, Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project, 1938.

With notions of warfare, this last example seems to confirm the idea of the body of a cancer patient as a battleground or war zone. In her critical essay, Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag identifies the controlling metaphors of cancer and its treatments in post-war medical language as those of the battleground and tactical warfare. She illustrates how the language of battle is applied to the cancerous body:

…cancer cells do not simply multiply; they are “invasive.” Cancer cells colonize from the original tumor to far sites in the body, first setting up tiny outposts (“micrometastases”) whose presence is assumed, though they cannot be detected. Rarely are the body’s “defenses” vigorous enough to obliterate a tumor that has established its own supply and consists of billions of destructive cells. (Sontag, p.64)

As Sontag demonstrates, the language and metaphors used to describe and codify cancer and its treatments are harsh and many: Cancer invades, cancer cells colonize, the body’s defenses are compromised, cancer patients are seen and targeted as victims, cancer treatment is aggressive, the patient’s body is bombarded with toxic radiation or chemical treatment, treatments are designed to kill or destroy, individuals “fighting” cancer are expected to be heroes and to battle their illness, and finally, we must participate in the “war on cancer.” While some of this language seems natural and while metaphors can certainly aid us in our understanding of something as incomprehensible as cancer, they nevertheless distort and mystify the disease.

These metaphors suggest that technological warfare is being waged within the body of the cancer patient, from which it necessarily follows that we enter this battlefield with “weapons” of our own, which are prescribed to us by medical professionals. With the use of these aggressive military metaphors, the patient’s body becomes thought of and treated as a battleground. However, while the slogans in the cancer ads identify the enemy as cancer, separated from the host, depersonalized, and dehumanized, the target is nevertheless human. The patient, a human subject, is the target who is invaded not only through medical imaging technologies, which provide an effective means of surveillance, but also through surgery, radiology, and chemotherapy treatment. As a result of these wages of war, the patient suffers injuries and sometimes casualties, completing and solidifying the dominant metaphor of warfare. Under the medical gaze, the patient is viewed simply as a body with a disease and the illness is understood as an exclusively bodily process. The individual becomes a medicalized body whose identity is constructed by codified documents, medical texts and images.

But as Susan Sontag decisively concludes, “We are not being invaded. The body is not a battlefield. The ill are neither unavoidable casualties nor the enemy…. About the metaphor, the military one, I would say, if I may paraphrase Lucretius: Give it back to the war-makers.”

Sources:

Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.