Museum installation to honour Darwin
A cross-section of a 200-year-old tree will be installed in the Natural History Museum to honour Shrewsbury-born Charles Darwin.
A cross-section of a 200-year-old tree will be installed in the Natural History Museum to honour Shrewsbury-born Charles Darwin.
The work, by Tania Kovats, 41, was selected by judges over proposals by Turner Prize winners like Rachel Whiteread and Mark Wallinger.
The 17 metre-long permanent installation, cut lengthways to include the roots, trunk and branches and inserted into the ceiling of the mezzanine gallery, will become one of the largest specimens at the museum.
It will be unveiled on February 12 2009, exactly 200 years after Darwin was born.
The tree is inspired by a diagram in one of Darwin's transmutation notebooks. London-based artist Kovats said: "The cross-section is a way of understanding anything in the natural world."
Charles Robert Darwin, who established the theory of evolution, published his findings in On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection in 1859.
Born in Shrewsbury, he was educated at the Unitarian day school and Dr Samuel Butler's boarding school in the town. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University before moving to Cambridge University, from where he graduated with a BA.
By his own account, the most important event in Darwin's life was his voyage on the Beagle. During its five-year circumnavigation of the globe, he collected and classified geological and animal specimens which formed the basis of his great work.