Plant Science was the result of a two year collaboration with the Estates Department and The  Performance Foundation at Kings College, London. We created an evocative three room installation in response to the university’s abandoned Plant Sciences Department laboratories in Herne Hill.

Abandoned for more than twenty years, 68 Half Moon Lane was a site of great innovation in the teaching of biological sciences and most recently the location of Nobel prize-winning research by the James Black Foundation. Its abandoned laboratories, seminar rooms, lecture theatres, and storerooms still evoked a strong sense of collective endeavour.

As a tribute to a remarkable building and an examination of the practice and personalities that inhabited it, we retold a particular chapter in the history of King’s scientific teaching and research by creating a large-scale site responsive installation, imagined as an auction 'viewing day', in the Inigo Rooms, Somerset House, London; bringing the spirit and substance of one of the college’s suburban outposts back to the centre of the city and reconnecting it with the contemporary university.

Plant Science was a meditation on the apparatus of study and learning; an exploration of the performative qualities of the lab bench and workstation as sites of intense scrutiny and discovery and devices for pedagogical exchange and experiment. Glasshouse, green-board, test bench, workstation, fume cupboard, propagation bed, specimen cabinet and fire door - a building distilled to its essential elements, clarified, separated and reconstituted in the neoclassical environment of Somerset House.