Features

Artwork by final-year art students at Oxford University will go on show this weekend at the annual Ruskin Degree Show.

Taking place from 21–23 June at the Green Shed, Osney Mead, with a private view on 20 June, the public exhibition will feature a bold and diverse range of work in a variety of forms and on a number of themes.

The show, which will present the work of the 24 Ruskin School of Art students graduating this year, is always eagerly anticipated and generates lively debate among those who attend. Last year’s exhibition attracted more than 1,000 visitors from Oxford and further afield.

Jason Gaiger, Head of the Ruskin School of Art, said: 'The Ruskin Degree Show is one of the highlights of the year, attracting interest across the University and bringing a large number of visitors from beyond Oxford who want to experience at first hand cutting-edge contemporary art and to identify the next generation of leading artists.'

Melanie Gurney, one of the students organising and exhibiting at this year’s show, said: 'The quality of the artwork in this year's show is outstandingly high. The size of the Green Shed allowed many of us to be bold and ambitious. The Ruskin degree show 2014 will be bigger and better than ever before.'

Sponsors of this year’s event are HMG Law, Bonhams, and Joshua Horgan Print and Design.

Participants in last year's Degree Show have gone on to win awards for their art, including James Lomax, who secured a Sky Arts Scholarship, and Jack Stanton, who won the Saatchi/Channel 4 New Sensations Prize.

James said: 'Degree shows are a pivotal moment in an artist's career – they allow for both engagement in creative practice and curatorial exercise while preparing the artist for life past art school as they look to seek funding and venues from outside sources to allow them to showcase their work. My degree show gave me the necessary skills to build upon, and these skills have allowed me to successfully continue my career as an artist past art school.'

The Degree Show is open to the public and free to enter from Saturday 21 to Monday 23 June from 12pm-5pm.

Yesterday a giant blast levelled the top of a mountain, part of the 3000-metre peak of Cerro Armazones in Chile.

But this bang is nothing compared to the Big Bang that the telescope the mountain was blasted for will be studying. The European-Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will be the world's largest optical and infrared telescope and will help astronomers to observe the early Universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, in unprecedented detail.

The E-ELT is being built by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), an international collaboration supported by the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council. Oxford University scientists are playing a key role in the project: I asked Aprajita Verma, Deputy Project Scientist for the UK E-ELT project at Oxford University's Department of Physics, about what makes the telescope so special and what discoveries it could make…

OxSciBlog: What questions about the Universe will E-ELT investigate?
Aprajita Verma: There are so many! The E-ELT is designed to be a versatile telescope that will answer a huge range of questions in astrophysics and cosmology. Some examples are understanding the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, studying extra-solar planets and looking for possible signs of life, and directly measuring the expansion of the Universe. 

In extra-solar planets, finding planetary systems like our Solar System but around other stars in the Milky Way is a key driver for the E-ELT. In the last 20 years we've gone from the first discovery of exoplanets to the prospect of directly imaging and studying the atmospheres of exoplanets that are at Earth-like distances from their stars with the E-ELT.

There's a whole host of contemporary astrophysics problems that we can tackle with the power of the E-ELT but perhaps the most fascinating and exciting prospect are the things we just can't predict yet. When we make such an enormous scale change from the currently largest telescopes in operation (8-10m) to a 39m telescope we can expect the unexpected! 

OSB: What makes E-ELT unique as an instrument?
AV: The E-ELT will be largest telescope of its kind in the world. The fact that it has a large primary mirror means that we can collect more light, so see deeper into the Universe but it also gives us the ability to observe objects in the Universe in exquisite detail. 

The telescope incorporates a system that's called adaptive optics that basically corrects for the blurring caused by atmospheric turbulence. This allows us to get the best possible resolution from the telescope, that's dependent on the size of the mirror, rather than the atmosphere. Space telescopes, like the Hubble Space Telescope [HST], are put up there to get above the atmosphere to avoid this blurring producing some of the most iconic images of the sky we know. But it's simply not feasible to put a mirror of the size of the E-ELT into space, so what the E-ELT can deliver is space quality images but from the ground. 

The E-ELT images will in fact be 16 times sharper than the HST! There are several advantages of having a ground-based telescope, we can take advantage of new technologies as they get developed, we can maintain the telescope, we can guarantee a long lifetime (not true of most space telescopes). The E-ELT's baseline operation is at least 30 years but we can expect it to be around taking images and spectra of astronomical objects for several decades to come.

OSB: How are Oxford scientists involved in the project?
AV: Oxford scientists are heavily involved in two main aspects: Instrumentation and science. For the former this means designing and building what can be thought of as the "eyes" of the telescope. The primary mirror collects the light but then this is passed through four further mirrors to a suite of instruments that span different capabilities. These instruments then record the light in different ways.

For example, for the first phase of the telescope there will be two instruments, a camera that takes very high resolution images of the sky called MICADO, and an instrument called HARMONI that is being led by Professor Niranjan Thatte. HARMONI is as an integral field spectrograph or imaging spectrograph. This means that you get an image, but for each pixel in that image you get a spectrum. This is an extremely powerful and versatile instrument, and it's a credit to Professor Thatte and his team that ESO selected their instrument to be available at early light. 

We're also involved in other instruments foreseen for the E-ELT, a multi object spectrograph that can take simultaneous spectra of objects in the sky over a wide field (ELT-MOS), and the technologically challenging instrument dedicated to studying extra-solar planets (ELT-PCS). 

Several Oxford scientists will be future users of the E-ELT and are therefore very interested in understanding the capabilities of the telescope and how that will aid their research and the UK astronomical community. Professor Isobel Hook and I work with the UK instrument teams and the community to promote and develop the science case for the telescope. Professor Hook has led ESO’s E-ELT Science Working Group that defined the key science cases for the telescope, and the ESO's E-ELT Project Science Team. 

OSB: After the ground-breaking what are the next big milestones?
AV: The next big steps for E-ELT are the dome and main structure contracts that are currently out for tender during the next months. Once the tender process has been completed this means that actual construction of the telescope will start. 

The contract for the primary mirror production is also a major milestone. The primary mirror of the E-ELT is so large that it can only be constructed by making it in smaller parts. In fact the E-ELT primary mirror is made up of 798 segments, each 1.4m across. Around 1000 segments will be made including spares, so this is a major contract. It's a challenging contract to fulfil as the precision on the smoothness of the mirror surface is very high, it's equivalent to ripples of a few centimetres on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean! To preserve the quality of the primary mirror, 1-3 segments will be removed for cleaning and coating each day! 

OSB: What puzzle from your own area of research do you hope E-ELT might solve?
AV: I'm really excited about the prospects for using the E-ELT to push the boundaries of the observable Universe to the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. We can only go so far with current ground based facilities and the E-ELT might be able to capture galaxies that were in place in the Universe at only 2-3% of its current age (or about 300 million years after the Big Bang). This will give us tremendous insight on how galaxies first began to form in this very young Universe. We think that about 700 million years later, galaxies like the Milky Way just started their lives and the E-ELT will be able to capture these objects in unprecedented detail and help us understand how our own galaxy might have started its life. 

The Bodleian Libraries' summer 2014 exhibition tells the story of the first two years of World War One, focusing on compelling eyewitness accounts ranging from the Cabinet table at 10 Downing Street to outposts of the Empire in Africa. 

The Great War: Personal Stories from Downing Street to the Trenches draws upon the Bodleian Libraries extensive collections to reveal the different meaning and impact these first two years of the war had on politicians, soldiers and civilians.

Highlights of the exhibition include the diary entries of Cabinet member Lewis Harcourt, who secretly kept a record of Cabinet discussions during the war even though this was forbidden. These are going on public display for the first time. 

The exhibition will also feature personal letters from Prime Minister Herbert Asquith to his confidantes, a letter from future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to his mother from the trenches, a draft of Edmund Blunden’s poem ‘Thiepval Wood’ written at the Somme, and letters from T.E. Lawrence ('Lawrence of Arabia') describing his intelligence work in Egypt.

The exhibition opened yesterday (18 June), on the same day that the winners of an Oxford University-run language contest for schools were awarded their prizes by Michael Steiner, the great-nephew of author Franz Kafka. The contest asked young people to create a piece of work on the theme of ‘1914’. It was run by the Oxford German Network in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages.

The exhibition is on display in the Exhibition Room in the Bodleian Library’s Old Schools Quad on Catte Street until 2 November 2014. It is free to enter, and opens from 9am-5pm on weekdays, 9am-4.30pm on Saturdays and 11am-5pm on Sundays.

Image: A war memorial in Thiepval Wood, the site of a battle in World War One which inspired Edmund Blunden's poem 'Thiepval Wood'. A draft of the poem written while Blunden was at the Somme is currently on display in the Bodleian (credit: Bodleian Libraries)

The Ashmolean Museum will be holding a special late opening this weekend, offering a final opportunity to see its most popular exhibition on record. 

Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art from the Pearlman Collection has already attracted over 70,000 visitors, and is the first time this outstanding collection has been exhibited in Europe. This Saturday and Sunday, 21st-22nd June, the museum will be open until 8pm to give more visitors a chance to see the collection before it returns to the USA. 

Professor Christopher Brown, director of the Ashmolean, said: 'I am delighted that Cézanne and the Modern has been such popular and successful exhibition. The Pearlman Collection is one of the finest groups of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art to be found anywhere in the world, and the exhibition at the Ashmolean has provided a rare chance for people to see it here in Britain.'

At the heart of the exhibition are 24 paintings which span Cézanne’s career, showing the development of the artist’s treatment of fruit, trees and Provençal landscape. 16 of the works make up one of the finest groups of Cézanne watercolours in the world. 

Other highlights include Van Gogh's Tarascon Diligence, an unusual composition showing a stagecoach at rest in a sunlit yard, and Modigliani's distinctive portrait of Jean Cocteau. Works by some of the most famous artists of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements are also on display, including pieces by Degas, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec which demonstrate the diversity of their approaches to the human figure. 

The collection was put together by the American businessman Henry Pearlman, who was an avid collector of art until his death in 1974. He said of the first painting in the collection: 'When I came home in the evenings and saw it I would get a lift, similar to the experience of listening to a symphony orchestration… I haven’t spent a boring evening since that first purchase.'

Due to the unprecedented popularity of the exhibition, booking is essential.

This week a volcano is erupting in central London: this three metre high model may not be as scary as the real thing but its mission is to highlight the real risks posed by volcanoes.

Located outside the capital's Natural History Museum, London Volcano is an exhibit dreamt up by researchers at University of East Anglia and Oxford University for Universities Week (9-15 June). So far the smoke and pyrotechnics have given just a taste of the eruption that struck the Caribbean island of St Vincent in 1902, but, on 11 June (6pm-10pm), this mini-volcano will recreate the Big Eruption in a free event open to the public.

I talked to David Pyle of Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences, one of the scientists behind the exhibit, about the St Vincent eruption, the research the model draws on, and the serious side to blowing things up… 

OxSciBlog: Why recreate the Soufrière St Vincent volcano?
David Pyle: St Vincent's volcano has erupted several times in the past 300 years; and each of these events has left us a record of what happened before, during and after the eruption. By looking at the written history of what happened, and analysing the rocks and other materials thrown out during these eruptions, we can better understand how to prepare for the effects of future eruptions. 

We have chosen to recreate the 1902 eruption of St Vincent over the five days of the exhibit. This eruption was very damaging, but also recorded in great detail - both in terms of the physical impacts (the ash, mudflows and hot pyroclastic currents), and the wider social and economic impacts, and the ways that the island recovered from the eruption. 

We are currently involved in a large international collaboration, called STREVA, whose focus is to reduce the negative impacts of volcanic activity on people and communities who live around volcanoes; and the approach this project is taking is to start off by seeing what lessons we can learn from the events of the past.

OSB: How can studying this volcano tell us about volcanoes in general?
DP: St Vincent's behaviour is fairly typical, both in terms of the nature of the eruptions, their size and spacing in time; and in the way that some eruptions are explosive, and others are not. So this means that it is a good 'physical' model for other volcanic systems, and we will be able to extend our new understanding from St Vincent to other volcanoes.

OSB: What were the biggest challenges in creating the model?
DP: Time! The opportunity to do this arose only a few months ago, but was not to be missed. And space - we weren't quite sure how big the model would need to be to have an impact. As it is, we are very happy with the result, even though it needs quite a large lorry to move it!

OSB: What do you hope people take away from the exhibit?
DP: We are really keen to engage with visitors to think about 'risks', and how to help to reduce the impacts of volcanic activity on communities whose livelihoods are tied to the volcano. The visual spectacle will make an impact, but beyond that we also want to show how we can use a huge variety of information sources to help improve our capacity to live with risks. 

We are also using the event to link back to communities on St Vincent; listening to their stories of what happened in the last eruption on the island - in 1979; and working with the volcano monitoring and emergency management agencies in the Eastern Caribbean to develop and evolve mitigation plans for the future. This volcano exhibit is going to be the starting point for discussions with governments, agencies and businesses to help develop better plans for coping with future volcanic emergencies in the Caribbean and elsewhere.

OSB: What other volcanoes might you like to recreate and why?
DP: It is now more a case of 'we have a model, and will travel..' and my ambition is to reuse the volcano model as the focal point of an exhibit that we can take to schools, science festivals and exhibitions, to continue the conversation.