I have 3 sculpture installations in the 2016 Bloomsbury Festival (19-23 October, http://bloomsburyfestival.org.uk/ ). The theme of the festival is Language

Tree of Language in Senate House, London WC1E 7HU

This mobile sculpture celebrates language diversity by showing the evolution and relationships between the Indo-European languages. Taking inspiration for its form from Alexander Calder, it uses data from a scientific article applying techniques used to study evolution of viruses to language families to determine the branch divisions and lengths. Vertical distance represents time: each 7cm is 500 years. Divisions in the branches show where languages diverge. Current languages form a mass of leaves at the bottom. Extinct languages languish further up. The different major language groups have leaves of different shapes and colours. The whole moves and interacts, as languages do – borrowing from each other but not changing their fundamental origins.

The Language of the Genetic Code in the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London WC1E 7HT

The genetic code is arguably the oldest language in the world. DNA is made up of strings of four nucleotides which are referred to by their initial letters: A, C, G, T. The order of the letters (nucleotides) determines which amino acids are coded for and therefore which proteins are made. This is the fundamental building block that makes one person different from the next and one species different from another. It takes just 3 letters (known as a codon) to code for an amino acid.

In the mobile sculpture, “Codons”, all possible combinations of the 3 letters based on A,C, G and T are shown.  They are arranged in a loose helix, representing DNA, which gradually divides, representing the multiplication of cells and organisms. . 

DNA is arranged in chromosomes. “Karyotype” uses giant flame tree seed pods to show the 23 human chromosomes.