A MUSHROOM cloud of body parts hangs from the ceiling of the Devonport Navy Museum, symbolising a nuclear explosion which has deformed sailors' bones.
It is one of a handful of artworks created by Point Chevalier School pupils in response to the museum displays.
Eleven-year-old Darcy Brown, the spokesman for the school's gifted and talented education programme, Mindbenders, explains the idea.
"In the 1950s they were doing nuclear tests and sailors that were close had to turn their backs to the explosion and put their hands over their eyes."
He says the men suffered after their chromosomes were damaged by the blast's fallout. "Their fingers started growing in weird ways from the radiation."
Pupils gathered X-rays of human body parts and hung them from the skeleton of an old umbrella, like a mushroom cloud, to represent the deformed fingers.
The Mindbenders group won the Kids Curate competition with its entry, We're Curative.
They visited the museum in June and selected exhibits which stood out for them, before returning to school and exploring different forms of art.
Darcy and his team chose the story of the Kiwi and the Moa... "two minesweeper ships made out of wood were patrolling the Solomon Islands in 1941", he says. "They came across the Japanese I1 submarine but it was bigger than them and had a cannon on top that was four times the size of their guns."
The New Zealand ships were not built to fight, but the Kiwi pushed the submarine and rammed it against a reef, sinking it.
The school group decided to make a picture book of this story.
"We transferred Moa and Kiwi into actual animals and turned the submarine into a crocodile because it was quick."
Darcy says the Mindbenders' artworks will open up the exhibition to more people.
"We realised we didn't understand some words in the original stories. The little kids can understand what we're saying."
Navy Museum educator Anna Hodson said visitors were spending considerable time looking at the children's artworks before going into the main gallery to see which works had inspired them. She said the exhibition showed children and adults think in a different way.
"We're more literal, but students don't take everything at face value. They've thought more poetically about how they could interpret the exhibits."
Pt Chevalier School's deputy principal, Phil Spriggs, who formed the Mindbenders group, said the project had given pupils a better understanding of the Navy.
"They know how the museum curates an exhibition and how they put it together from start to finish," he said.
"They've had to do the whole process themselves and they've realised it's a very time-consuming process that has lots of different components."
In the Navy
The exhibition is showing at the Torpedo Bay Navy Museum, Devonport, until November 30. It is open from 10am to 5pm seven days a week. Entry is free.