I have been lucky to be involved with a couple of art-science collaborations over the years. Below are some details of the brilliant artists involved and some information about the outputs that resulted from our time together.
The Nectary (Alison Smith, 2018-present)
but the first was with the fantastic Alison Smith (Twitter, Instagram), an artist based in Leeds. Alison and I were brought together by a Leeds Cultural Institute programme called "Creative Labs" that was designed to facilitate collaborations between artists and scientists. We spent a lot of time discussing ideas (there's most of a notebook full of wonderful sketches and scribbles) but the final project idea was The Nectary. The concept was based on the soundscapes produced by almost invisible insects as they fly among flowers. As part of Tom Dally's PhD project in the group, he recorded a series of soundscapes in flower meadows with varying numbers of flowers. We played three of the soundscapes, corresponding to low, medium and high floral richness, through speakers embedded within the different flowers. The soundscapes allowed visitors to experience pollination (and the loss of pollination when flowers are rare) in an entirely new way. As visitors moved from one flower to another, they mimicked the movement of pollinating insects within a flower meadow. The flowers are all made of waste plastic that is diverted from landfill.
The Nectary made its debut at the 2019 Leeds Light Night and has appeared at various Light Night events as well as the Bluedot Festival and several other art-science events over the past couple of years. In 2022, The Nectary will be appearing once again at Bluedot as well as Kendall Calling. Alison is always growing the installation so it gets bigger every time!
Whether, Weather Radar: Plume of the Volants (Prof Redell Olsen, 2021-present)
As part of the BioDAR Project that has been a focus of the lab since 2016, we have been lucky to work with Professor Redell Olsen from Royal Holloway University London. Dell is a poet, writer, and visual artist who won a highly competitive DARE Art Prize to fund a collaboration with the BioDAR team. Dell has been a valuable part of the team throughout the project - asking questions that we would not have thought of, adding interpretations and cultural references that are beyond the scientists' field, and ultimately producing a fascinating and innovative body of work: Whether, Weather Radar: Plume of the Volants. The online exhibit represents a great deal of content and creative expression related to the history of radar, the study of insects, and the ongoing biodiversity crisis. The online gallery was complemented by a temporary exhibition at The Tetley gallery in Leeds and an accompanying book. We are grateful to Dells contributions to the wider project and are enthusiastically pursuing the collaboration beyond the end of the prize fellowship.