Visitors to the Museum in the Park’s latest exhibition are being fascinated, delighted and disturbed by Cleo Mussi's inventive and fantastical mosaic installation, 'Pharma's Market, a Livestock and Produce Show'.

Recent news stories about meat from cloned cows entering the food chain and farmers who use imported embryos, the offspring of cloned cows, to propagate their herds, remind us of our uneasy relationship with Science and Technology and Mother Nature. Apparently its considered perfectly 'normal' in the USA to sell and eat meat from cloned animals, but here in Britain we're not entirely convinced its a good idea.

Cleo's mosaic installation explores these fears and the contrasting imagery of historic and contemporary farming.

Visit the exhibition and discover a nostalgic vision of an idyllic (fictional?) rural past - the green and pleasant land of plenty, where the sun always shone and the harvest never failed. Or visit and encounter robotic figures from a 21st Century world of biotechnology, mass production and 'test tube' factory farming, where food is invented in laboratories and crops are tended by machines, and scientists are busy mixing and modifying and re-inventing life.

The installation manages to be both dark and disturbing, and beautiful and uplifting, and very, very funny. Its been described by one visitor as "sickening, marvellous, disturbing, well worth visiting," while another person said ‘I’ve travelled 50 miles to see this and would have come 100 miles!.

Do visit and see for yourself. 'Pharma's Market' shows at The Museum in the Park Gallery until Saturday 21 August 2010, open Monday to Friday 10am to 5pm and Saturday and Sunday 11am to 5pm. Admission is free.

Contact for further information and images: Abigail Large, Museum Administrator, tel: 01453 763394, email museum@stroud.gov.uk or visit www.museuminthepark.org.uk