ON THE WALL: Visitors taking a look at the artworks on display at the exhibition.               Photos by Shaji

Antonia Rosati, Community Engagement Officer, UCL.

 

Qatar’s natural heritage in a different light

A UCL-Qatar project, involving students from local

schools, melds art and science to portray the

country’s flora and fauna in a unique perspective

By Umer Nangiana

 

Using microscopy and science, a University College of London Qatar (UCL-Qatar) project has allowed students from three local secondary schools to artistically portray flora and fauna specific to Qatar, forming its natural heritage.

The results of the project, the exuberant microscopic images taken from the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) artistically done by the students, have been put on display at an exhibition at Katara Art Centre (KAC), Building 5, at the Katara Cultural Complex. The exhibition is open to public until November 23.

Students from Al Ruqayya School, Qatar Canadian School and Doha College have created artworks to form the basis of the exhibition, named as ‘Qatar Natural Heritage under the Microscope: Designs based on Flora and Fauna found in Qatar.’

Around 60 designs and patterns extracted from microscopic images of local flora and fauna are displayed at the exhibition together with the study process. The programme was designed to bring together Qatari heritage, art and science.

Initiated by Antonia Rosati, UCL Community Engagement Officer (CEO), the exhibition was conceived and designed by Doha-based artist Mariana Heilmann. Mariana is an international artist and active member of the Doha art community.

“This project was a collaboration between our community engagement programme and Mariana Heilmann. We were basically trying to look at the ways to create a project that could bring out elements that we are interested in; and arts together, to make it an engaging process for students,” Rosati told Community.

UCL-Qatar’s main reason for being here, she said, is to teach people about cultural heritage and it offers various programmes on it. The Qatari natural heritage exhibition also involved Dr Aspasia Chatziefthimiou, an ecologist based in Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar besides Philip Connolly, the Archaeologist Materials Science Laboratories technician at UCL-Qatar.

“Mariana’s interest is in microscopy so what she was thinking to do was to look at different elements of Qatari natural heritage and sort of doing investigation into this, using fabulous pieces of equipment that we have, the SEM, which helps open the students’ eyes to the kind of secret world within the natural world of Qatar,” said Rosati.

An Anglo-Columbian artist based in Doha, Mariana has exhibited and sold her work internationally over the past 20 years. In collaboration with Rosati, she designed the programme that merges art, science and heritage.

Mariana’s experience and method of using scientific imagery as a starting point for designs exposes the students to learning about the world we live in from a very different angle. The programme was aimed at allowing people to take a closer look at the natural heritage of Qatar and appreciate the scene and it targets not just Qataris but expatriates as well. “It was also to give people a kind of view that science and art are very much interlinked,” said the UCL-Qatar’s Community Engagement Officer.

The expertise contributed by Dr Apasia and Philip Connolly allowed the project to be very specific to actual flora and fauna specimen found in Qatar.

Dr Aspasia generously contributed to the programme by putting together a diverse array of samples and information of some of the flora and fauna found in Qatar, the basis of this project.

Her research in Qatar focuses on the behaviour of bacteria adapted to life in the extreme climate of sand dunes, mangroves, wadis, rawdats, sabkhas and intertidal zones.

Connolly, on the other hand, has a wide range of experience in biological sciences, Chemistry as well as material science. He assisted with producing images from the SEM.

To create the images in the SEM, the sample often no more than a few milometers in size, is coated in a thin layer of gold. This gives the specimen a charge which makes it visible in the SEM. The specimen are placed in the SEM chamber under vacuum and scanned with an electron beam.

The signal resulting from each point in the scanned region is then processed and displayed as a monochrome image.  “When you see all the results together you realise that what an impact it could make,” said Rosati.

This, she added, is just a kind of primary project that we are working. “It went down so well with the students who we worked with and with the schools and with other people who are interested in science and arts that we would really like to expand and develop it,” said the UCL Qatar’s Community Engagement Officer.