Exhibitions
When did you last see an exhibition that inspired you?
Destroying Nature: Histories of people and environments
Great North Museum: Hancock. Newcastle-upon-Tyne
July 26 - September 28, 2025
Explore a self-led trail that invites you to take a fresh look at objects from the Museum’s permanent exhibitions through the lens of environmental history - the study of the changing relationship between people and nature.
This trail has been developed by History students from Newcastle University’s School of History, Classics and Archaeology. They were challenged to research objects on display in the Museum and re-write their labels. What can these artefacts tell us about the interaction of people and nature in the past? We hope that by drawing attention to human impacts on environments in history, we can re-think our future.
Destroying Nature is led by Dr Kristin Hussey and Dr Clare Hickman from Newcastle University alongside the Great North Museum: Hancock team. It is the result of a second-year undergraduate module on Environmental History taught in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology. Funded by an Outreach and Engagement Project Grant from the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS).
Find out more here
Body Clocks
Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR), University of Copenhagen
January 25, 2023 - April 14, 2023
In Body Clocks, the body is dissected and the border between internal and external becomes permeable. The body is at the heart of science – but it is often broken down into cells, genes and model systems. Through these new works, art is brought back into the scientific center that inspired it - offering an engaging reflection on bodies, time, and scientific working practices.
In this series of installations, artist Isabella Martin is inspired by scientific research into circadian rhythms. In collaboration with Kristin Hussey and scientists from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR), Martin has produced a series of new works that re-imagine the body clock through the artist’s lens.
Curated by Kristin Hussey and Malthe Bjerregaard.
The World is in You
Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen
September 29, 2021- January 16, 2022
The World is in You is an exhibition about how the body is entangled in – and influenced by – the various environments it inhabits, from the bacterial world to the solar system and beyond. The exhibition will explore the theme of the entangled body through the lens of four scientific fields – microbiome research, epigenetics, chronobiology and astrobiology/bioastronautics – in combination with art and cultural artefacts.
The World is in You is a partnership exhibition between Kunsthal Charlottenborg and the University of Copenhagen, curated by researchers from the Medical Museion and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR).
Curated by Adam Bencard, Jacob Lillemose, Malthe Bjerregaard, and Kristin Hussey.
Z-Time
Medical Museion, Copenhagen
October 30,2020 - June 1, 2021
You are made of time. Literally. Our bodies have evolved over thousands of years to keep time with the rising and setting of the sun. Strong environmental cues, called zeitgebers, tune our body clocks to the world around us. Disrupting these circadian rhythms (døgnrytmer) can have a profound effect on our health.
Can you freeze time? Can you control how organisms perceive day and night? Can we ever look at time objectively given that we are always inside it?
Art is one way to make sense of these complex questions. This exhibition presents an artistic look at the experiences of scientists who study time. Created by artist Isabella Martin, in collaboration with Medical Museion researchers and scientists at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research (CBMR), it explores the curious ways that scientists make and modify time.
You can visit the online version of this exhibition here.
Curated by Kristin Hussey.
‘This vexed question’: 500 years of women in medicine
Royal College of Physicians Museum, London
September 19, 2018- January 18, 2019
Women apothecaries, herbalists, writers of recipes, midwives - and of course physicians - have worked within a male-dominated world for centuries. Their roles have always provoked debate, which still continues today. During the infamous Surgeons Hall Riot a male medical student bemoaned the ‘vexed question’ of women in the medical professions.
Should women be allowed to train as doctors? Were they physically and mentally capable? Was there space for them in the profession? How would their male colleagues react?
This exhibition explored the intriguing stories and battles of famous and forgotten female figures from more than half a millennium of medical practice. Featuring RCP President Jane Dacre's newly-commissioned portrait alongside Elizabeth Garrett's qualifying certificate, a 17th century handwritten recipe book and 20th century oral histories, visitors took a journey through the history of female doctors and the evolving attitudes toward them over the past 500 years of the RCP’s existence.
Curated by Briony Hudson and Kristin Hussey.
