Art, Design, and Biology

Regeneration

“Plants are made of about 95 percent water…When temperatures drop, mysterious mechanisms kick into play inside plants that can weather the cold.”³² Below is a painting of an Enlightenment experiment which involved the gradual removal of oxygen from a glass case until a bird collapsed and appeared to die until it was revived with the readdition of oxygen. Onlookers view the experiment in An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1768 with a wide variety of emotions: pain, disgust, fear and wonder. Mosses are nonvascular plants and survive drying out when there is less moisture through a biological process called anabiosis where there biological processes slow down significantly.³³

Mosses and microorganisms such as waterbears that live on mosses have convergently adapted to changes in moisture by drying out without dying in the process and revive when water returns.³⁴ This ability to survive has been a plant genetics research interest in agriculture when faced with periods of drought.³⁵ Moss is like Lazarus in this way because it appears to come back to life from this process of slowing down and withering up and “reducing nutrient supplies,” in this way mosses potentially model how to be sustainable to survive by using less of their resources when under stress.³⁶ Unlike the bird dying for lack of air plants like moss can survive in a closed terrarium because through the biological process of photosynthesis they can create oxygen and support life.³⁷ A famous example of this is the electrical engineer David Latimer’s closed terrarium that is still alive today that was created in 1960 with Tradescantia moss and went without the addition of water until 1972 because it has an ecosystem that supports itself with enough sunlight.³⁸

Figure 3, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1768.

The painting An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump contains light that reminds the viewer of the dramatic lighting of Caravaggio. The darkness that shrouds the experiment suggests the knowledge gained from the experiment is the spark of human understanding. French Enlightenment philosophers such as Rene Descartes and Denis Diderot wanted “illuminate the present with an eye to changing the future,” with rational thought found through empirical observations from experiments.³⁹ The British female enlightenment writer Mary Wollstonecraft advocated for the right to an education for boys and girls.

But the Enlightenment brought with it many discontents. Wollstonecraft’s daughter was Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein, a fictional story of an experiment gone horribly awry. Shelley’s Frankenstein can be compared to The Swamp Thing, which is the visual inspiration for a portion of instruction for drawing moss in a stylized comic book manner in lesson 2. The Swamp Thing by the British author Alan Moore is not a story is not written for children as the target audience. There is a horrifying scene in The Swamp Thing during an anatomy dissection in which it is revealed that the moss has replaced the organs of The Swamp Thing who was once human but fell into a toxic swamp.⁴⁰ Teachers can however carefully select and scan or print images from the text which can be used to demonstrate figuration, texture and color theory with the color green.⁴¹ An alternative to the Swamp Thing conceptually is the character of Oscar the Grouch, the Muppet that used to be the color orange and turned green, so the storyline goes because he fell into a swamp!⁴²

A terrarium in the classroom can potentially increase a sense of wellbeing in the classroom. Besides being attuned to the color green, the smell of soil because of the harmless bacteria geosmin been found to promote a sense of peace and can be found in compost and moss.⁴³ A calm classroom is conducive to a classroom community and learning environment.