A new naturalism is afoot in the world of art. Science is fueling many artistic imaginations, and the result is a reimagined naturalism responding to contemporary needs. Let this trend grow, for it will be good for both art and science.
Lamina Project, an online New York-based art gallery focused on the bridge between art and science, is pushing this trend with great effectiveness. The gallery draws together artists who make compelling art taking inspiration from science’s cutting edge as it reveals more deeply nature’s underlying processes. I saw last year Lamina’s exhibitions in three art fairs in New York, and had conversations with the artists showing their work (1). This experience set me on an exploratory journey through the art-science nexus.
When John Keats, in 1819, ended “Ode on a Grecian Urn” with these words:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty---that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
he immortalized in transcendent language an insight that was not new during his time but whose resonance he deepened in a miraculous way, renewing (through the whole poem) a great idea that still has enormous currency. Addressing questions about truth and beauty in a 2015 book (2), the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek references at one point Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and James Clerk Maxwell (he came after Keats). Wilczek sees them as searchers looking for the physical world’s embodied beauty in the belief that such beauty not only reflected God’s glory but also revealed the world’s deep design. He even suggests we might think of the world as a work of art (3).
Anticipating Wilczek, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an Indian-American astrophysicist who too won the Nobel Prize in physics, wrote in 1987 a book of essays on truth and beauty (4) showing that aesthetic considerations opened doors in the process of scientific discovery. In discussing the truth-beauty nexus, he drew upon Plato, Francis Bacon, John Keats, Roger Fry (the painter and art critic), and Henri Poincaré (the mathematician and physicist). He also discussed the twentieth century physics giants, including Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, concluding that aesthetic intuitions played indispensable roles in the creation of both relativity theory and quantum mechanics, the two supreme achievements of modern physics.
When in the 1950s, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins discovered DNA’s double helix structure, Watson and Crick said they knew they were right because the structure was beautiful. One might surmise that beauty drives discovery significantly not only in physics and cosmology, but also in other sciences. Does this mean, however, that the degree to which beauty has a role is the same in all sciences? Probably not though beauty, surely, remains a crucial factor. Intervening in a 2010 online symposium on visual culture and evolution (5), historian of biology Nathaniel Comfort said, “The mathematical aesthetic---austere, simple, and effortless---imports more successfully into some sciences than others.” Taking biology as an example, he thought that “genetics is more elegant than biochemistry.” Biochemist and historian of science Rick Welch disagreed. Both genetics and biochemistry possessed aspects that were elegant, he said.
In a recent book on scientific and artistic creativity (6), theoretical physicist Tom McLeish shows us that while the ‘scientific method’ remains good for the empirical testing of an idea once we have had the idea, it alone does not show the way to a hypothesis. For that, creativity and imagination are necessary instruments. McLeish discusses imagination’s efficacy for science in terms of three modes: visual, literary, and musical. Though he doesn’t give visual imagination priority over the others, he says that “the task of ‘seeing’ the universe from the picture that we call the sky bears clear structural resemblance” to what artists call into being when they ask “the observer of a painting to recreate a three-dimensional world from a representation or impression on a two-dimensional canvas.”
In his discussion of the visual imagination, McLeish draws upon the experience of astrophysicist Ashley Zauderer when she participated in the discovery of an extraordinary event that a star triggered four billion years ago as it wandered too close to a supermassive black hole, and the latter began to swallow it. This cataclysm began streaming X-rays and radio waves that reached Earth in 2011. McLeish quotes Zauderer saying, “In terms of visualization, even though the radio image is two-dimensional, I like to see the geometry in my mind’s eye and often imagine what events look like in reality because in astronomy, we see only ‘in part’ and you have to reconstruct the rest in your head.” Interpreting this process, McLeish says that “we must supply by induction what neither sight nor deduction is able to do.” The visual imagination thus unites artists and scientists within like activities. Even the beholder enters the picture, for she too must complete the art-work in her imagination.
Awe and wonder were a part of Zarauder’s experience of scientific discovery. Says she, “I will never forget [the] sense of absolute awe, wonder, and connection to the Universe I felt when I first saw this whopping bright radio source in space that was so unexpected.” In a recent book on wonder and awe (7), philosopher Helen De Cruz describes the two interrelated emotions as epistemic and self-transcendent things that stir us to engage with a world that is suddenly seen in a new light, driving thereby curiosity, discovery, and new thinking. She discusses wonder and awe primarily in the context of religion, science, and magic, and while she references visual art, she doesn’t really bring out art’s role as a historically validated source of the two emotions. For that, we might turn to another philosopher, Jesse Prinz. In a 2013 essay on wonder, he includes art along with science and religion in a triumvirate that has given impetus to humanity’s “greatest achievements” and spurred in turn “epicycles of boundless creativity and enduring inquiry.” In wonder and awe, art and science have yet another unifying force.
We saw above that when Ashley Zauderer spoke of her awe and wonder, she included another emotion: her sense of a connection to the universe. This is surely akin to a spiritual experience, a profoundly existential feeling. There can be no longer any doubt the three things often animate both scientific and artistic creation.
For an impressive picture of such artistic creation, look no further than the art championed by Lamina Project, the art gallery I discussed above in paragraph 2. Jody Rasch, a New York-based artist, is Lamina Project’s lead artist. He not only conceptualized the gallery’s goals and business model; he is building a movement embodying the art-science interface.
In his own art, Rasch transforms scientific images from radio astronomy, electron microscopy, particle accelerators, and spectroscopy so as to at once express the patterns of the natural world and the metaphors underlying modern science. In his case too, the driving emotions are awe and wonder. Dominant also is a yearning to express the very connection to the universe discussed above, something much larger and greater than ourselves. Hence his application of gold in much of his work, the inspirational source of which is the symbolic gold of medieval Europe’s devotional art. Another important influence: Impressionism’s exploration of light, including the optical science-inflected pointillism of post-Impressionist Seurat. See “Einstein’s Ring V”, 2021, which depicts a cosmic geography that enigmatically makes you think of an earthly vermilion archipelago in a coral sea. Yet another innovation is Rasch’s adaptation of ideas from Chinese art---the use of rice paper, the conjoining of imagery with calligraphy, the evocation of poetry, all evoking another enigma, the wondrous linkage between science and mathematics.
The previously-discussed discovery of DNA’s molecular structure in the 1950s was a major milestone in creating an interface between physics and biology. Already in 1931, Paul Dirac foresaw life’s nature becoming a vitally important question for both the sciences. Contemporary developments show that biology may even be on a path to preeminent status among the sciences. Fitting therefore is this: of the nine artists currently working with Lamina Project, five are biology-focused and, via his latest work, Rasch is adding heft to this group.
Consider Shanti Chandrasekar, who grew up in a scientific community in India and became a science-inspired multi-media artist in the United States, taking sustenance from both the Western artistic tradition and traditional Indian art, especially the quotidian, fractal-infused Kolam art to which she was exposed from childhood. After years mostly addressing astrophysical motifs, she has begun imagining an astrophysics-biology nexus---as in these 2024 paintings: “Information Paradox-Cosmic Web”, and “Microglia & Black Hole”. Through stylized renditions of cosmic and biological phenomena, she suggests a unifying cosmic web. Life may not be confined to Earth; it may be germinating throughout the universe.
Rebecca Kamen is an artist and academic lecturer also focused on the art-science intersection. While building a career addressing this nexus via multiple scientific disciplines, it’s neuroscience, especially computational neuroscience, that today preoccupies her. She’s addressing a scientific cutting edge, for even as biology is becoming first among equals among the sciences, neuroscience will likely dominate biology during the foreseeable future. Her current series of acrylic-on-mylar paintings—"Reveries” and “Warming” ---are ethereally beautiful because they poetically evoke the unseen and unknown. They also suggest nature’s astonishing complexity, an essential task given biology’s growing importance.
Another artist exploring the art-biology interface, including neuroscience, is Julie Harrison, a multi-genre visual art who, since 2017, has created biomorphic drawings and paintings embodying journeys through the microscopic and neuronal activities that define life. A recent show of her drawings, “Landforms and Bodyscapes”, primarily highlighted a “Brains” series addressing the relationship of the physical to the mental, and a coastal and landform series that incarnate a Zen-like allusiveness even as they reveal the natural features’ fractal geometries. While seeing the show, I thought I glimpsed the unity the universe has at all levels.
Michal Gavish, multimedia artist and former research scientist, is captivated by the beauty of the microscopic and nanoscale world, with which she remains in contact via collaboration with biologists and chemists. Leveraging visual access enabled by new imaging and genomic testing technologies, she transports her viewers to imaginative experiences that are vitally important, for the biological processes she recreates artistically are critical to humanity’s future. For a solo ongoing show sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Gavish has created neuroscapes opening doors to the human mind’s intricate universe.
Mark Pomilio, a painter who also makes freestanding drawings, is an artist who addresses geometry, fractals, cloning and single cell manipulation. His images depict the unfolding and transformation of geometrical patterns to suggest the process whereby a single cell divides and compounds into a complex organism, his broader goal the formation of visual metaphors communicating the evolution of biological forms. Supporting his process is a preoccupation with symmetry and a color strategy that induces meditative mindfulness. See how his 2023 painting “The Approach of Spring” nudges you to see the natural world afresh.
Cosmology including relativistic and quantum mechanics, as well as the mysticism of Taoist philosophy mediated by a Japanese aesthetic, have both influenced Sandra Lerner’s worldview. Pervading her art is the idea that the universe is an inseparable reality enfolding an interrelationship of all things. Also nurturing her paintings are her love of color and her visceral connection with paint’s texture plus her sensitivity to the nexus between music and visual art. All these things coalesce in her “Entanglement” paintings, which explore cosmic consequences flowing from the utterly enigmatic entanglement between subatomic particles.
Inspired by the astounding natural world revealed by particle physics, Ann Parkin finds in it “a new set of imagery and symbols for our time” (her words). Employing traditional and non-traditional materials and techniques, she derives from this insight a distinctive art in two genres: graphic art and art jewelry. She rightly says that though her imagery looks abstract, it embodies a naturalistic response to the world of elementary particles. See her lyrically evocative piece “The Poetry of Existence” (2024). This raised mixed-media painting will likely tell you that Parkin is creating a new type of landscape.
Carter Hodgkin is another artist who mines the world of particles but she does so by capturing still images from particle collision animations that she herself generates. Marrying labor-intensive handcraft with these digitally-produced forms, she produces a variety of artworks. She makes paintings incorporating collage and hand-painted paper squares. She produces glass-tile mosaics, and large-scale animated installations. Her aim: energy visualizations creating a new language of abstraction charged with emotional possibility. She thus gives us a new Expressionism. See how her “Red Crossing” (2020) alludes to a wondrous sense of cosmic sublimity.
When Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” (1859), he concluded it saying:
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
I think of Darwin’s breath-taking insight when I view the work of Lamina Project artists, for taking as their ken the art-science nexus, they are generating from it artistic “forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” Through this means, they are unveiling an immediate, direct communication linkage between the scientific world and the world at large, a task of the greatest importance at a time when expanding global threats mean we need more science, not less---and more art as well. The artists discussed above are carrying out this task through many forms of scientist-artist partnership entailing not only disseminating research results through an artistic lens but also at times reconceptualizing visually a particular biological or other natural process. Notable also are Lamina artists creating reciprocal relationships with a variety of scientific institutions, including CERN, Geneva, through artist residencies and other activities. By enlarging the human imagination and making us see the world afresh through awe and wonder and new affective connections to the universe, art may also be triggering new scientific thinking. WM
Notes
1. Lamina Project exhibited again at the Volta Art Fair by participating in the edition held at New York from 5-8 September 2024.
2. Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design, Penguin Books, New York (paperback edition, 2016; first published in the U.S. by Viking, 2015.)
3. The same idea was expressed millennia ago by the ancient Indian Vedas, which saw the universe as an artistic creation, brought into being by the gods through an imaginative act. See William K. Mahony, The Artful Universe: An Introduction to the Vedic Religious Imagination, State University of New York Press, Albany (1998).
4. S. Chandrasekhar, Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London (paperback edition 1990; first published 1987).
5. JD Talasek, Rick Welch and Kevin Finneran (eds.), Visual Culture and Evolution: An Online Symposium, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.: University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and Johns Hopkins University Master of Arts in Museum Studies program, 2011. See chapter entitled “Does the Idea of ‘Elegance’ Function in Science as It Does in Art?”
6. Tom McLeish, The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, and New York, USA (2019).
7. Helen De Cruz, Wonderstruck: How Wonder & Awe Shape the Way We Think, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, UK (2024).