Christine Lowthian
Beautiful light responsive qualities of practice pieces discarded on the bench influence decision making about how to mount the work. It would be lovely to let light shine all the way through the finished sculpture….. consider using perspex and how to accomplish a professional looking finish.
There’s a word that I have invented for this phase of the dice project – I rather like it.
It has been very interesting to read about the history of neuroimaging and its development from employing EEG technologies through to modern MRI and CAT scanning techniques, also to understand the difference between functional and structural scans. It would be lovely to actually get hold of some MRI ‘slices’ printed on ‘film’ (plastic assumedly?) and be able to play around , perhaps collage with them etc. however, I imagine it’s impossible unless they are your own scan results …… ah well…..
But, while feeling a bit deflated about not being able to follow through on the scan film idea, I did have a bit of an epiphany….. I have shed loads (almost literally!) of polystyrene and there is a polystyrene cutter in the studio ….. ‘plastic’ sorted!
I have begun to sketch out some ‘shapes’ derived from the visual research I have done about neuroimaging and have been practising cutting them with the polystyrene cutter …. I am calling this process neuroimagining…… sort of drawing/carving 3D neuron tropes out of the polystyrene.
The process of driving pieces of polystyrene past the hot wire is very soothing if you are not wanting an accurate cut, however following the lines I had drawn on the polystyrene is quite difficult without a lot of practice. Also, the pen marks make the edges produced ‘dirty’ if you melt them so you have to work either just within or just without the guide marks you have drawn. There is a carving tool on the machine too, but, it needs new wire on it so, I will develop some skills with that when we have replaced the broken one.
In further visual research, I came upon this – exciting! This has produced some rather less cliched and more conceptual responses to consider than the images I found earlier in my initial searches.
I have very much enjoyed browsing through the various competition galleries from over the years. Here are some of my favourites. … a vast array of different styles and media.
MIND …plastic…photography.
Another mind map.
Initial visual research… looking for photographs of ‘the mind’ might be a bit futile so instead I have been thinking about images that depict mental/brain activity and my first few sketch book pages reveal how prevalent un-accredited artwork is …. much info- graphic, and illustrative material being produced for American clinic brochures and websites …. no artists’ names which is such a pity given that although, a lot of rather cliched visualisations are ‘out there’, the skills, time and effort that has gone into creating them really should be acknowledged !
To explore the ‘photography’ methodology I dice-rolled, I am going to use the notion of ‘neuroimaging‘ AS ‘photography’ and do a bit of research about the history of this field while I contemplate the ‘plastic’ aspect of this week’s experiments.
Putting the term ‘bio artists’ into a search engine, produces some glorious results – quite edifying. The term arose while I was watching the ‘dual brain’ TED talks and I am thankful, not only to have discovered some fascinating art as a result but, also; appeasing the frustrations I felt at the beginning of the week, discovering some artists actually working in textiles around the ideas I am exploring.
First, I came across Melissa Fisher https://www.mellissafisher.com and within her site, work entitled ‘Microbial Me’. This, I find completely fascinating.
Her site is well worth taking the time to browse thoroughly; raising interesting notions about, art being able to make the unseen visible, about artists working in tandem with research scientists – I LOVE THAT IDEA!!! – and about the team of artists involved in the ‘The Invisible You: The Human Microbiome’ project at ‘The Eden Project’. I must confess that I feel like a bit of a green eyed monster – I’d love to do work in a context like that!!! but more on the Eden Project in a minute.
Regarding Melissa’s work, I am intrigued, in particular, by the beauty of these etchings,
and the way her process evolves from the ‘living’ sculptures created on the agar face moulds through drawing processes to the making of the etchings – stunning.
Browsing The Eden Project Microbe Art – Sketchbook research pages.
I expanded my research from the Eden website and from reading the catalogue by visiting the websites of the artists whose work had caught my eye. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Rogan Brown’s reflections upon his work and the description of how material, process and concept unite in the realisation of his work.
” Art and science are each valid ways of seeing the world: Science makes us understand what we see, and art makes us feel it. Art can therefore act as a valuable bridge between science and the general public, taking the complex factual data that scientific research provides, and through craft and imagination, make it accessible and pleasurable for people without specialised training.”
Rogan Brown.
This quotation from Rogan Brown about the potential links between art and science, reminds me of some of the teaching points I made about art and science at JCS when I was doing the ‘nature’ topic with the Y9 students. One of the ideas I invited them to consider (when they were researching hyper-realist artists) was the place such work can have ‘in the real world’ (i.e. to contextualise it) I was quite interested, in how artists can actually bring clarity to ‘people’ with specialised training’ , and not just as Rogan suggests, ‘make information pleasurable to people without it’. At the time, I introduced the students to work by medical illustrators and we discussed the merits of that type of visual reference for scientists rather than, for example, photographs….. the latter often depicting just a gory mess whereas, through drawing, specific structures can be revealed more clearly. Back then, I was quite intrigued by Johns Hopkins University’s Art/ Medical Science course gallery. More art/science validation I think, coming from the enabling work( for patients), that anaplastology artists can do!
https://medicalart.johnshopkins.edu/
