One of the challenges facing people wanting to communicate climate and environmental stories is how to reach outside the usual circles, one way of doing this is through cultural organisations like museums and art galleries. On a recent trip to Oxford I visited two very different exhibitions that explored environmental issues.
The Bodleian Library’s Wonder of Birds exhibition is inspired by the The Book of Birds, thenew book from Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane. It’s structured around the ‘seven wonders’ of birds – nest, egg, beak, song, feather, flight, and migration, using art work and words from The Book of Birds alongside items from the Bodleian’s collection and Oxford ornithological research. Information about threats to birds and conservation projects is included alongside. Bringing together art, literature and science helps the curators tell a rounded story and means there are lots of ways for visitors to connect with the themes.
The exhibition is particularly interested in how humans have understood and interacted with birds, focusing on connection and wonder. Highlights for me included Gerard Manley Hopkins’ manuscript of Windhover which was paired with Jackie Morris’s painting of a kestrel, and John Buxton’s diary from his time in a POW camp during the Second World War. Buxton set up a birdwatching group and got permission to build bird boxes, activities designed to help combat hunger and exhaustion. The birdwatchers created field maps and recorded behaviour and song cycles. Both the poem and the diary drew on personal observations, and this idea of close looking at nature ran through many of the exhibits.
Other items included bird callers, a Great Auk egg from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, John James Audubon’s giant book Birds of America, bird rings, early Sufi astronomical manuscripts, and an informative poster exploring the shape and science of birdsong. A quiet soundscape of bird song plays in the background, weaving together different birds and their habitats, from the dawn chorus in the Mendip Hills to Delhi and Great Tits in Wytham Woods near Oxford.
Jackie Morris’s trademark use of gold leaf adds a richness to the low lit exhibition and also turned out to be an unexpected visual link with the second exhibition. Climate, Culture, Care is part of the Ashmolean’s NOW exhibition series, where contemporary artists are invited to create new work inspired by the Ashmolean’s historical collections. Soma Surovi Jannat is the first Bangladeshi artist-in-residence at the museum and her work in this exhibition draws inspiration from the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world, and the Ashmolean collections to address the climate crisis. Her work also uses gold leaf, which is part of the earthy palette of colours that dominate the show.
The Sundarbans are facing a number of threats from climate change including rising sea levels and salinity, as well as deforestation, overfishing, and mining. Where Every Leaf Holds A Tale is a series of eight paintings which explores the essential role of mangroves along tropical coastlines, as natural storm barriers and carbon stores. Another series, Who Carries Whom?, is concerned with the bond between humans and horses, where the value of animals is often bound up in usefulness.
A key thread through all the works is the way that people and the environment are connected, exploring issues such as biodiversity loss, forced climate migration, natural disasters, inequality and the particular impacts on women and children.
Items from the museum’s collection also feature and a video shows where motifs taken from them have been used in the new works. This means that there is a real sense of dialogue between the historic and the contemporary. It also helps visitors find a way into works that are full of details, this is an exhibition that repays close looking and one where not everything is spelled out. The 10 metre long scroll Between the Sea and the Sky, Who Holds the Ground? is an excellent example of this as it explores a whole range of interconnected issues and stories through a series of vignettes which include people and wildlife. There’s a slightly surreal and dreamlike quality to much of the work which roots it in global storytelling traditions.
The two exhibitions use library and museum collections to very different effect, but both were interested in showing the connectedness of people and the natural world, and in spaces that might not necessarily be associated with environmental communication.
Wonder of Birds runs until 3rd January 2027 at the Weston Library
https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/wonder-of-birds
Soma Surovi Jannat: Climate, Culture, Care runs until 1st November 2026 at the Ashmolean Museum
https://www.ashmolean.org/exhibition/ashmolean-now-soma-surovi-jannat
Both exhibitions are free of charge.
Shelly Dennison is a director of JRI. She is a freelance writer and communications consultant, supporting not-for-profits.