Evolution's Ark I

The collecting mania of the enlightenment backed strict believers in the story of Noah and the Ark into a tricky corner.

As zoologists, botanists, amateur naturalists, and professional hunters scoured the earth, bagging and boxing every living thing – not to mention every trace of any once living thing – the creationists of the time could no longer overlook the growing mountain of evidence. How could Noah have possibly fit all that into one measly ark? As Sheriff Brody so eloquently said in the movie Jaws, you're gonna need a bigger boat.

The solution they found to get them out of that corner was a work of pure genius. As it turns out, they said, we've been interpreting the biblical measure of a cubit incorrectly. It is in fact much, much bigger than we previously imagined. And with that, Noah's modest ark took on a new design and dimensions, morphing into something remarkably similar to a modern container ship.

This, in a nutshell, was the inspiration of Evolution's Ark, an imaginary natural history museum in the form of a container ship, and the subject of Rick's MA in Visual Communication at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. Each container on the ship houses a discreet topic like individual genes in a sequence; as the ship travels from port to port, it drops off and adds containers, changing constantly, and evolving over time.