Through a glass lightly

The Oxford University Botanic Garden is among the oldest botanic gardens in the world and the oldest in this country. Founded in 1621, it was created to grow plants for medical research and its collection has provided material for botanic study ever since.

For most of that time, the glasshouses have existed on the site. It was recently realised that the condition of the glass along the corridor connecting the greenhouses in the garden needed to be replaced. Rather than simply replace them, an idea arose that also has a historic tradition.

The development of the microscope by Robert Hooke, who studied at Oxford, and Antony van Leeuwenhoek, opened up a new world to artists as well as scientists and in that tradition an opportunity was seen for a collaboration between artists and botanists at today's Botanic Garden.

The glass would become a canvas through which the world of plants not visible to the naked eye would be revealed. Hortus in Vitro - through a glass lightly calls on the talents of visual artist Rob Kesseler, a professor at Central St Martin's College of Art and Design, London, who uses plants to inspire his work.

In the Oxford University Museum there are 19th-century carvings which refer to the plant specimens in the Botanic Garden. Hortus in Virto honours and extends that tradition. Like many artists, Rob uses technology to open up the amazing structures that exist at a microscopic level.

The green algae-stained panels of glass that originally lined the corridor at the Botanic Garden have gone. In their place stand gleaming new laminated-glass panels etched with microscopic specimens of seeds and pollen which have been magnified up to 5,000 times on a scanning electron microscope.

By using the microscope to create the etchings, the complex anatomy of plants and seeds reveals an abundance of exquisite and complex forms that would not be visible to the naked eye and highlights the extraordinary creativity of nature.

Moreover, the effect of looking through the glass is to simultaneously view the plants and their microscopic specimens. As the backdrop of the sky changes from blue to grey, the images set against the green leaves of the plants alter their intensity and become an everchanging art form.

These changes, however, do not detract from the beauty of the etching. The aim of the work was to create a balance between catching the eye without detracting from what is growing in the glasshouse. These images balance both needs perfectly - the more you look the more you see.

Those who know and love the glasshouses at the Botanic Garden can be assured that their structure has not been altered. Old glass has merely been replaced by gleaming new sheets on which highly-magnified images of seeds and pollen taken from the very plants close to where the glass rests have been etched.

As he inspects the finished panels with a well-deserved degree of satisfaction, Rob hopes his work, his first commission to create magnified images on glass, is narrowing the artificial gap that has grown between the arts and science.

For the past seven years he has collaborated with botanists. These partnerships have resulted in a diverse collection of works including publications, installations, artworks and images.

In 2001, Rob was awarded a three-year fellowship by the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (Nesta) to enable him to collaborate with the scientists at Kew and to explore their collections.

It was his first book, Pollen, the hidden sexuality of flowers, produced in collaboration with Dr Madeline Harley, that propelled his work into the public domain. His second book, Seeds, time capsules of life, in collaboration with Dr Wolfgang Stuppy, of the Millennium Seed Bank Project, Kew, increased his popularity further. Both books were recently awarded gold medals at the Independent Publishers Awards in New York.

The Botanic Garden in Rose Lane is open to the public seven days a week and admission charges apply.