In a chapter by Maria Kind called ‘Returning on Bikes: Notes on Social Practice’, she reminds us of something that should hopefully be obvious, namely that: ‘… not all social practice projects are interesting and relevant, just as all painting is not uninteresting and irrelevant’ (in Living As Form: Socially-engaged Art from 1991-2011, ed. Nato Thompson, Creative Time Books, 2012).
Convergence / Creative Lab. is a project being developed by geologist Mathilde Braddock and painter Sara Dudman; one that straddles the type of divide within art world thinking implicit in Kind’s observation. Essentially it’s a material “conversation” between the two women with very different disciplinary backgrounds and sets out to address a number of significant issues: creative, environmental and intellectual. A conversation that I have been privileged to join at a couple of points and hope to continue to do so.
Not the least of the questions this conversation raises is that of the vexed cultural relationship between “art” and “science”. Or, as I have suggested may be a more appropriate designation, between the often highly dogmatic mentalities of aestheticism and scientism. Mentalities based on presuppositions unthinkingly built into specialist disciplinary “languages” and transmitted via the ways those “languages” are used to make claims about how the world is known and understand.
In the remainder of this and the next post I have reconstructed Braddock and Dudman’s first ‘update’ on their work-in-progress. I’ve done so because I believe they are engaged in a project that intends to do something rather different from usual art/science collaborations. These tend to be based on assumptions grounded in deeply unequal “authority” positions. As a result, they tend to produce work that merely illustrates or, as one artist has memorably put it, “sexes-up” scientific work data. Data that would otherwise only be of interest to a specialist scientific audience. In short, that supposedly “popularise” science by refiguring it in a largely spurious “artistic” form’. This project, in contrast, is set to take a very different, and much more genuinely collaborative, approach; one that does not take for granted what so many other art / science projects tend to do.
My hope is that, as this project develops, I will be able to report on its discoveries.
[N.B. All images in this and the following post are copyright of Sara Dudman and Mathilde Braddock].
Can a collaborative art and science interpretation of the geology of a place bring us into deepened connection with the Earth?
This is the question at the core of our Convergence | Creative Lab which brings us – Mathilde Braddock and Sara Dudman – together to explore how a geologist and an artist interpret the landscape, what a deeper collaboration between these disciplines might look like, and define its value by testing its potential and limits.
Over the last six months, we have been combining art and science and the intergenerational perspectives of two women to blur the boundaries and explore our convergent and divergent approaches to interpreting the land and landscape. We have infused and disrupted our own and each other’s practice. We have spent time learning from and about a place, with care and attention for the planet, each other and ourselves as a central principle in all aspects of our work.
We are in the thick of exploring the potential of this collaboration, but some of the themes that are emerging include:
- Empathy versus disconnection
- “Flat rocks” – the parallels between our artistic and scientific approaches
- The role of aesthetics and beauty
- The contrasts of soft/hard, organic/geometric shapes and processes
Our exploration so far
We kept our methodology open and fluid to enable us to follow research strands that felt most relevant and rich. We have been walking, sitting and spending time immersed in the landscape of the West Somerset coast, foraging for pigments, stories, data, visual and sensory resources.
We also spend time immersed in each other’s professional worlds.
Our exploration so far
We kept our methodology open and fluid to enable us to follow research strands that feltmost relevant and rich. We have been walking, sitting and spending time immersed in the landscape of the West Somerset coast, foraging for pigments, stories, data, visual and sensory resources.
We also spend time immersed in each other’s professional worlds.
in the lab at the University of Bristol pouring over papers, maps and microscope imagery:
and in Sara’s studio processing the earth pigments and exploring the visual information, earth samples and other resources gathered from our site visits:
