Made during her residency at the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford, Derges' Vessel series focuses on the theme of metamorphosis and echoes the chemical narrative of the distillation process. In the past, Derges recorded the life cycle of the frog, and the Vessel series reprises her investigations in this area by returning to an observation of frogspawn and toadspawn. The spawn patterns inside a round-bottomed flask have an abstract quality and generate associations with the sorts of images seen down a microscope or through a telescope. As such, they provide a means of thinking about scale, the relationship between science and nature, and the processes of recognition and transformation.
