Jenny Pollak

First published on 14 Jan 2010. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

Cyanobacteria, aka blue-green algae, often gets a bad rap in the media: their toxic blooms infest waterways, causing havoc to human and animal life. Jenny Pollak, artist in residence at the Royal Botanic Gardens, is doing her best to give the bacterial plant some better publicity. Based on her year at the Gardens, she has created an installation and an exhibition based around the microscopic life form.

"The dominance of blue-green algae over 1.5 billion years is considered by many scientists to be the most important event in the history of life on earth," Pollak says. "The levels of oxygen were so low that life couldn't evolve, and UV kept the planet sterile. Blue-green algae produced oxygen and created the ozone layer."

Pollak had a vision of the planet "as an enormous laboratory experiment." She was also interested in humanity's shared ancestry with plantlife. "If you look at some of the structures of the red algae, some of them look like blood vessels," she notes. From this idea, two multimedia works, '21%02' and 'In the Beginning', emerged. "I've superimposed images of algae over human bodies, in a metaphorical way drawing attention to the fact that once upon a time, way back in history, we came off the same ancestral stem."

Her residency last year also coincided with the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. "A lot of the work also ties in with the process of evolution, looking at it in a more poetic or metaphorical way." She has made a pop-up book out of The Origin of Species, with different organs emerging from each page; she also blends text and nature by using labels and poetry to complement laboratory beakers containing plant life and microscopic pictures.

Pollak traces her interest in biology to her childhood, growing up with her biochemist father and biologist mother. "We had a microscope in the house and I grew up investigating the natural world. It's re-emerging in my work now." She was the artist in residence at the Electron Microscope Unit at Sydney University in 2005 and 2006 - a position they created for Pollak - where she took hundreds of photographs of life under some very powerful lenses. "It's nice to be able to share things that are normally not there for everyone to see. I want to help people get back that sense of wonder in the natural world." Vivienne Egan