Refreshing art

Reaching the parts science doesn’t reach

Science is developing a meaningful and mutually beneficial relationship with art.

A strong commitment to the arts is not the most obvious part of the work of a research-funding charity. But the Wellcome Trust’s science and art programme is a crucial part of its public engagement initiatives.

"It’s the Heineken effect," suggests Ken Arnold, who runs the Trust's exhibitions programme. "In general, people don't thirst after science, whereas art is consumed and is part of some people’s lives. We want to reach as many people as possible, so presenting aspects of science via the arts allows us to reach people who would not be reached by, say, a science centre event or a lecture on DNA."

Supporting the visual arts in particular allows the Trust to highlight the long and rich visual tradition of science, which continues today (think of all the MRI scans or fabulous scientific images used to illustrate medical or research stories in the press). Visual artwork and exhibitions are extremely well placed to interrogate our understanding of our bodies through looking - what better place to do this than in galleries and museums?

The Wellcome Trust’s Public Engagement programmes specifically aim to highlight and explore the medical, social, cultural, historical and ethical interlinkages of science. Science is part of culture and part of society - a point emphasised by art inspired or influenced by science, sometimes in subtle ways, and sometimes very boldly. The relationship is far from one way: art may draw upon discoveries or scientific thinking for inspiration, but in return can offer new perspectives - challenging, questioning, provoking, forcing us to think again about our own perceptions and beliefs.

In addition to these ‘public engagement’ rationales, the science and art programme also enriches the lives of the collaborating scientists. "My hunch," says Dr Arnold, "is that many scientists feel their part in a collaborative artistic process allows them to ‘step back from the coal face’ and think about how their work fits into the bigger scheme of society and culture. Of course we don’t anticipate some great scientific discovery as a result of these collaborations – we’re not doing this to find another DNA. But there’s no doubt that the collaborations we have brokered have been very productive for the scientists, sometimes in unexpected ways."

Science and arts support

The main thrust of the Trust’s science and art work over the last seven years has been the sciart programme. Much of its success, says Dr Arnold, has been down to its collaborative nature: the work has been driven by a consortium of the Arts Council, the Gulbenkian Foundation, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), the British Council and the Scottish Arts Council. This has meant that sciart did not become another ‘bubble’ - a world of people talking only to other initiates - but kept a broad focus on enabling a new dialogue between science and art to develop.

Scientists and artists responded to the initiative in a remarkably enthusiastic and innovative manner. Among the most well-known examples are the extraordinary dresses of designer Helen Storey, developed in conjunction with her developmental biologist sister Kate, and the ‘Painter’s Eye’ project, which opened up new ways of thinking about how portrait painters work, through the application of new technologies such as eye tracking and brain imaging. Such projects have had lasting impact - Helen Storey has continued to work in the area and to explore issues of creativity and innovation, while the extended project team involved in ‘Painter’s Eye’ has gone on to make more discoveries about the physical and mental processes involved in portraiture.

There is also evidence that projects can have a direct impact on medicine or research. One of the strengths of sciart in biomedicine is that it can focus on patients’ experiences in very illuminating ways. One such project, ‘After Image’, gave people who had had limbs amputated the chance to use digital images to evoke their experience of pain and of phantom limbs. As Ken Arnold points out: "Our language is very poor at expressing pain. We are very quickly reduced to simile to try and evoke the experience. This project created a visual vocabulary for the patients themselves, and a highly original medium of communication with others. The patients gained, the researchers gained, and the public visiting hospitals got to see an engaging exhibition in an unusual venue."

The popularity of the sciart initiative provided the encouragement for a related scheme targeting the performing and new media arts communities - Science on Stage and Screen. Run by the Wellcome Trust in 1998 and 2001, Science on Stage and Screen provided funding for theatrical, film, web and CD-ROM-based projects. Successful projects ranged from the innovative and playful, such as Forkbeard Fantasy’s visually stunning work The Brain, to more serious drama, including ‘Losing It’, a 30-minute drama that formed part of the Channel 4 series Off Limits, looking at young people’s experience of mental health.

This work will be taken forward through the newly launched Engaging Science grants programme. Small-scale projects will be eligible for funding through People Awards, while larger sums will be available through Society Awards - where science and art is one of three priority areas.

Collaborations

A big part of the new science and art grants, says Dr Arnold, will be "seeking out organisations where not only can we make a grant, but our own additional expertise will make the money go further".

An example of how this kind of collaboration has worked in the past is the ‘genomic portrait’ of geneticist Sir John Sulston by Marc Quinn. The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) managed the project, but the Wellcome Trust provided the funding and also brokered the introduction between artist and scientist. The result was the NPG’s first ‘conceptual portrait’.

As Dr Arnold points out: "A great range of arts organisations are hugely interested in biomedicine now. Our ideal with the new science and art grants would be a geographical range - a national organisation, and a regional one perhaps; and an artistic range - a project that is drama focused, one based on visual arts."

Exhibiting ourselves

The Trust has a long history of sponsoring and creating exhibitions, large and small. The Trust’s own TwoTen Gallery has recently featured Bill Burns’s ‘Everything I Could Buy on eBay™ about Malaria’, an installation displaying products acquired through the artist's dealings with the global online auction house, alongside malaria artefacts from the Trust’s own collection. The exhibition was stimulated by the completion of the malaria parasite genome sequence.

This year has seen the opening of an impressive new gallery space at the Science Museum. The Wellcome Gallery was launched in March 2002 with ‘Head On’, which explored our preoccupation with the head and what is inside it, in art, medicine and science. The second exhibition, ‘Metamorphing’, which opened on 4 October, is an eye-opening and endlessly fascinating look at change in natural and imagined worlds.

Next year will see two major collaborations between the Trust and the British Museum. The Trust has awarded the museum £5.5 million to enable it to create a new medical anthropology gallery. Medical anthropology - the study of how people across different cultures think about their bodies and about health - is a fitting area for the Trust’s involvement in two ways, says Dr Arnold: "It shows the Trust is willing to take a step back from Western medical science and look at other ways of understanding our bodies and our health. And it draws on the legacy of Henry Wellcome, who had an almost monomaniacal interest in health and medicine internationally - he just hoovered up ethnographic material."

The second major collaboration will draw even more directly on Henry Wellcome’s passion. ‘Medicine Man’ will reunite much of Wellcome’s own collection, about a quarter of which the Trust currently holds, and other parts of which are housed at locations scattered across the globe.

"Our premise is that one of the world’s great collections has ‘gone missing’," says Dr Arnold, "and we have found it and are putting it back together. From the million or so objects in Sir Henry’s collection we will be selecting about 500 exhibits - some with particular individual stories attached, some arranged en masse to give a sense of the vastness of Wellcome’s undertaking. We will be mixing archaeology and anthropology and history in these exhibits, and seeing what they all say about how we understand the body."

Seventy years after Henry Wellcome’s death, we are in what could be called a ‘postdisciplinary’ world, trying to break down some of the intellectual and cultural barriers between science and art, between scientists and the public. The Trust’s science and arts programme, suggests Dr Arnold, is one way in which we can "get away from boxed-up culture".

Dolly droppings and contraceptive dresses: Science and art highlights

1997 TwoTen Gallery, specialising in science and art exhibitions, opened.
1997 sciart scheme launched by Wellcome Trust.
1998 Science on Stage and Screen scheme launched.
1999 sciart expanded with creation of sciart Consortium.
2000 Artist-in-residence scheme launched, enabling young artists to develop ideas at the Wellcome Trust.
2001 Marc Quinn ‘genomic portrait’ of Sir John Sulston exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery.
2002 Wellcome Gallery at Science Museum opens with ‘Head On’ exhibition.
2003 Wellcome Gallery on medical anthropology due to open at British Museum.
2003 ‘Medicine Man’, based on the extensive collections of Sir Henry Wellcome, due to open at British Museum.

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