Angela YT Chan 
In the context of the Horniman Museum exhibition The Lore of the Land by Serena Korda, I chaired a panel with the artist, Dr Rupert Sheldarke and Professor Veronica Strang. We spoke about the speakers’ interdisciplinary collaboration together between arts, historical research and the sciences, that explore the Horniman’s collection for the exhibition, and their themes on animism, non-human beings and reflections on nature in historical collections.
“The exhibition also addresses the artist’s understanding of the purported dichotomy between science and spirituality since the Enlightenment, and explores how the two can inform one another.
Korda’s work ‘Sensitive Chaos’ draws on spiritual belief and scientific studies that imply that plants can be sentient. Research in the field of biophysics suggests that plants, trees and fungi have sophisticated means of sensing what is around them, have intricate ways of communicating with their environment using electrical signalling, and can show altruism to one another.
Korda drew inspiration from the work of scientists including the physiologist Dr Rupert Sheldrake who developed the theory of ‘morphic resonance’, which suggests that nature has inherent memory and telepathy-type connections, and the 19th-century Indian polymath Jagadish Chandra Bose who pioneered devices to measure electrical activity in plants over 100 years ago.”
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