Ceramic art is a clever foil for a collector’s science teaching aids | Artificial intelligence
At the Surreal Science show cunningly crafted ceramic art create a fantastical experiment out of a master collection of 19th-century scientific teaching aids
Francesco Garnier Valletti Two boxes of wax fruits (lemons and peaches) 19th century Turin Image, Courtesy George Loudon Collection, Photograph by Rosamond Purcell
Surreal Science: Loudon Collection with Salvatore Arancio, Whitechapel Gallery, London, to 6 January 2019
WHENEVER the artist Salvatore Arancio visits a new city, he heads for the nearest natural history museum. He goes partly for research: his eclectic output, spanning photography and ceramics, explores how we categorise and try to understand natural and geological processes.
In the main, though, Arancio wants to be overwhelmed. “A lot of these collections are so vast, after a …