These are photographs from an exercise I did during my Art Foundation year at Bucks College. We had to bring in a box and essentially alter or evolve it, cataloguing the changes we made in drawings and photographs. We were encouraged to think about opposites, soft and hard, hot and cold, happy and sad, sharp and smooth. Each of us had our own supplies of acrylic paint, scissors, wire and wire cutters, pencils, masking tape, Stanley knife, PVA glue, and so on.

Much later, when I was a member of the Biochemical Society Education committee, the memory of this exercise formed the basis of Minimalist Biology, a public engagement activity developed with Dr Pedro Ferreira, then the Education, Public Engagement and Training Manager at the Biochemical Society.