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The Art Laboratory is my place of work. Here I teach science, build interactive Apps for student learning, create installations, such as the Museum of the Cell, and delve into the art and science of nature, through sketches and illustrations.
The Museum of the Cell was created in 2019 from an interactive learning and art installation at Tension Fine Art. The title of that show was Cell Graffiti.
The opening coincided with the 2019 Peckham Festival. The general public and my students were all invited to visit and to look around at the exhibits. There they could explore nature in a unique way through the lens of science and art combined.
The Art Laboratory itself has teaching facilities where I hold tutorial classes and teach online, whilst the pop up “Museum of the Cell”, that I installed there, is thoroughly documented with images and four videos I made about the exhibits. These relate to four different aspects of the science of nature.
The photographs and videos below document the various exhibits and explain the ideas behind them.
Enjoy!
1) Video 1: The Camera Obscura, and how it models the eye.
2) Video 2: Bread Making Chemistry.
3) Video 4: ATP, the energy molecule.
4) Video 6: Ribosomes and Protein Synthesis.
Section 1: The Camera Obscura. When visitors first saw this exhibit, many thought it was done with electronic trickery. But it wasn’t! The light comes into a darkened room through small holes cut into the window shutters. It lands on tracing paper carrying all the colour of the outside world with it. Magnifying glasses help focus the images. The evolutionary story, which this emulates, starts with the simple light sensors of scuttling woodlice, running for cover. Higher organisms evolved with these sensors embedded in cavities allowing them to create more complicated images. In this artwork we have a multitude of eyes peering up and down Trafalgar Avenue and St George’s Way, catching the landscape outside and the occasional 63 or 363 bus juddering past.
Section 2: The chemistry of bread making. (below left) Kneeding makes the bread dough rubbery and elastic as the action causes chemical bonds to form amongst the network of gluten fibres. Yes, modern flour has perhaps been customised to have too much of this stuff! The yeast then fills this rubbery network with carbon dioxide gas!
Section 3: The DNA spiral. (above right) This intricate scale model represents the spiral of a DNA molecule wound around a broom handle. After all, this was made in an artist’s studio! The coloured beads were all painted and drilled at the right angles using a homemade jig. Here’s the thing about giant molecules. The shape of the whole all depends on the local shapes of the individual atoms and their relations to their neighbours.
Section 4: Proteins! (below) More than meat and soya, proteins are tiny microscopic machines. They move around inside us powered by the hurricane speeds of clanking molecules bashing about in our cells and various twitching legs. The large curtain of hanging ping-pong balls are designed to emulate the membrane of a cell. The balls have symbols and images written on them with felt tip and paint. They form larger patterns and sequences showing the complex machinery of proteins that grant or bar entry to any living cell.
Modelling the Science of Nature in the Art Laboratory, human biology and the human soul.
Paintings, Tension Fine Art July 2024, Double Vision show. (Click for clearer image)
Paintings, January to July 2022, Souls series. (Click for clearer image)
Paintings, August to December 2021, Cells series. (Click for clearer image)
The Apps, in the right column are a crucial part of my teaching. I have built them up using coding and my understanding of science. They are developed in the art laboratory using large sketches, often on mounted cotton sheets, and the final products are easy to use and humorous. These include exam practice tools with computer marking. Treats are administered stochastically, with bonus chance for higher scores. The B7, App, meanwhile, reveals a simulation of the World’s first ever computer program. This in turn was created by Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, and was intended to run on the Analytic Engine, a computer designed by her great friend, Thomas Babbage. A playful App, called #2, designed to make production in the Art Lab easier, through using chance and administering treats, was the forerunner of the powerful, incentive based, revision tools.
On the left you have my illustrations, each capping a particular theme of the science of nature. Developed from large sketches, these provide the visual clues that tie together the ideas of each investigation in The Art Laboratory. These explore biology, cosmology and philosophy. They are all related to the science of nature and underpin my teaching approach in every tutorial. Many of my students are neuro-diverse, including probably me, and the visual aspect that I develop to accompany these ideas, almost like visual flowcharts, is what holds it all together and appeals to their own imagination.
