Name: Kate MacDowell Which came first in your life, the science or the art? The art. I started studying ceramics in evening classes at the local art school and community college shortly after returning from living and traveling overseas in India and Europe. I have a Master’s in Teaching English Literature, and in the past have produced websites for high tech companies, taught high school English, and worked at a meditation retreat center in India. My first…

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Name: Divya Anantharaman, owner of Gotham Taxidermy Which came first in your life, the science or the art? They both happened at the same time, as I continue to see both as ways of understanding our world, both incredibly valuable and influential to each other. The arts lend a much-needed touch of humanity to the sciences. Taxidermy work by Divya Anantharaman Taxidermy work by Divya Anantharaman “The arts lend a much-needed touch of humanity to…

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Name: Tina Gorjanc Which came first in your life, the science or the art? Science in the sense of curiosity for biology, materiality, and its functions has been intrinsically intertwined with my creativity from a very early age. I have been fascinated by natural organisms and the technologies that enable us to study and alter them since I can remember. However, the most straightforward answer to this question would probably be that art came first, especially…

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Name: Rose Sanderson Which came first in your life, the science or the art? I would say the art (although it does depend on how you define science)! I believe creating/drawing/making marks a very natural behavior and something that I have done since before I can remember. Being creative is in my blood. My skills background is in art, but my main interests are in science and nature. Which sciences relate to your art practice? The natural…

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Name: Simón(e) Sun Which came first in your life, the science or the art? Art and science both came into my life at the same time. Though they were introduced to me as separate and distinct disciplines, they played similar roles in my early life. I was raised in an incredibly strict, conservative, religious household. Nonconformity was not only discouraged, it was met with punishment. This conflicted with my identity as a trans nonbinary woman…

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Interactive Science-Art Helps Visualize Underground Contamination Pollution often conjures images of smokestacks rising into the sky or dirty water flowing down a stream. But what about the pollution beneath our feet—the contamination moving among particles of soil or between grains of sand? Artist and software developer Owen Fernley brings this often unspoken underground contamination to life with his work Between the Sand. This online interactive artwork shows how gas moves between grains of sand below…

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What happens when you put an artist in a science lab? When Dr. Kevin Mumford agreed to host an artist at his environmental engineering laboratory at Queen’s University, he expected a painter or sculptor to appear. Instead, creative coder Owen Fernley walked through the door, marking the beginning of what would become a surprising and memorable two weeks for the research group. From March 19 to 30, 2018, Mumford hosted Fernley’s Science Artist Residency. This…

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Ava Roth is an encaustic painter, embroiderer, and mixed-media artist based in Toronto. She also happens to be a beekeeper, and is currently working on a collaborative art project with her honeybees. From this project, Roth and her bees are producing a body of work entitled the Honeycomb Collection. In this interview with Art the Science, Roth describes how this project began, what it means to make art alongside honeybees, and the impact she hopes…

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Want to witness architecture come alive? Now you can with Philip Beesley’s Meander, the largest living architecture sculpture in the world, which is permanently on display at Tapestry Hall in Cambridge, Ontario. This artwork comes to life thanks to embedded computers and sensor arrays that “sense, react, and learn from [the] environment and the behaviour of [the] audiences.” These components constantly transfer data within the sculpture, causing the structures to respond to visitors with motion,…

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Name: Hannah Warming Which came first in your life, the science or the art? The science came first by many years—my enjoyment of SciArt is a very recent development. I’ve loved biology for as long as I can remember, was obsessed with bugs and animals as a child, and now have a Master’s in Biomedical Science. Since then, I have been working on my PhD in Neuroscience, but discovered a love for embroidery only six…

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