somewhat familiar, ‘sort of like a cactus in a barren landscape’. After seeing the call for the exhibition, Bauzá-Martinez began to explore different ideas of how she might represent this anomaly in a piece of art. A digital collage, a skill her father had taught her, using Adobe Illustrator, seemed the most imaginative way to share her experience. For this piece, Bauzá-Martinez wanted to capture the essence of Russian avant-garde painter Kazimir Malevich, ‘who uses a lot of red blocks and bold shapes and colours in his work’. The black lines around the separate frames and bright colours gives it a modern minimalist look but also somehow hallucinogenic. The bacteriophages are arranged in a cactus-like structure on the right, the extracellular vesicles are arranged in a rocky formation on the left combined with a real cactus and two poppy flowers, both elements often associated with mind-altering effects. The psychedelic sky is based on the essence of mass spectrometry, and the black and white canvas is an interpretation of the changing profiles of the proteome of the vesicles in different conditions. When asked what she wanted the public to experience when looking at her image, Bauzá-Martinez said that she ‘wants people to see that failed experiments aren’t always bad. I often learn the most through failure’, and in this instance the exploration path can also be beautiful.