Abundant in Drift

Abundant in Drift is part exhibition and part immersive installation; Nowinski fills the museum’s North Gallery space with works ranging from audio field recordings and drawings derived from microscope observations of specimens to imagined biological hybrids.

“There a little bit of a paradoxical thing that happens when you look through a microscope because by looking closer, you’re kind of narrowing down, and yet you’re experiencing an expansion,” Nowinski said. “I think those kinds of dualities I’m really drawn to in art, poetry, music, anything. There’s a truth there that lights me up a little bit.”

Her largest creation, the "Impossible Plant" is an imagined biological hybrid informed by various herbarium, living plant, and vertebrate specimens housed on the UMass campus. Nowinski’s exhibition highlights the importance of protecting and celebrating these priceless collections by showing their capacity for knowledge and memory in the context of our climate reality.

Abundant in Drift also featured an interactive microscope station at which visitors were invited to observe specimens beneath a microscope, draw their observations, and add their artwork to the wall beside Nowinski’s drawn observations. It was fascinating to see how people observed and celebrated these specimens in their own unique ways.

Throughout the semester, Nowinski’s exhibition and the microscope station were used as jumping-off points for the museum’s mindfulness programming, as well as class visits from UMass and the western Massachusetts community.