Art Meets Science

What do art and science have in common? Not a lot, you might think at first. However, if we focus on astronomy and space science, we can start to form connections through the beautiful images that we gather from our telescopes and probes. In fact, how we present that data, with the colour schemes we use to enhance the information that is contained in those images, is a much an artistic as a scientific process.

Some of the most iconic images have come from the Hubble Space Telescope and these are a fantastic vehicle for communicating the excitement of astronomy to public and students alike. However, we are always looking for opportunities to reach out to new audiences who don’t usually engage with astronomy. Our Creativity and Curiosity project has the aim of reaching these potential audiences through works of art created in response to the astronomical research carried out in Leicester and other universities, from studies of the distant universe to our own Solar System.

This project began in summer 2015, involving 3 artists – Ione Parkin, Alison Lochhead and Gillian McFarland, each working in different media.

Their art is not directly representational, in the sense that they are trying to produce works showing specific astronomical objects, but is about their response to the science.

However, what excites me is how much like the astronomical objects I study the artwork really is.

Exotic Planets and the Big Bang

For example, Gillian McFarland has been experimenting with glass blowing techniques with glassblower Graeme Hawes and these beautiful globes are reminiscent of exotic planets, which we can imagine might be the family of planets orbiting TRAPPIST 1.

Some of the effects of the glass blowing, with the extreme heat required and darker colours mixed into the glass also bring to mind the expansion of the universe in the Big Bang.

Nebulae and Icy Worlds

Ione Parkin is an abstract painter and she has become fascinated by the birth of the Universe and its constituents in clouds of dust and gas and the perpetual cycles of creation and destruction that we see.

I find her images, with the materials she uses, are striking recreations of the visual impact we get from Hubble images of star forming regions in our own Galaxy.

Her mixed media works on paper are inspired by planetary surfaces and they give me a real impression of fragile icy surfaces of moons such as Europa or Enceladus in the outer reaches of the Solar System.

Meteorites and Volcanism

As a sculptor, Alison Lochhead’s production processes are as dramatic as her finished works of art.

She transforms her materials, whether iron, rock, clay or minerals, in a kiln at extreme temperatures of 1300-1500°C and is inspired by heat, explosions and transformation.

She observes the result of pouring molten iron over difference materials.

For me, this process mirrors that of the formation of rocky planets in the Solar System and the results remind me of the some of the alien surfaces we see on objects like Io, which is extremely volcanically active, and the meteoritic debris from the asteroids that we often find on the Earth after being superheated during their passage through the atmosphere.