CHAPEL HILL – The lobby of Chapman Hall on UNC’s campus is full of colorful pictures as part of “The Scientific Art Competition,” which showcases “scientific data with an artistic appeal.” At a distance, they look like paintings or abstract drawings, but with a closer look, the pictures reveal themselves to be photographs of the microscopic and intricate workings of cells. It’s science turned into an art form.
It’s this intersection of art and science that six current and ex-scientists have tackled with their open approach toward two typically polarized fields. They’ve dedicated their lives to their work, and managed to find commonalities that they feel can possibly bridge the gap between art and science.
Each scientist had their own story of what brought them to their art. Keith Burridge, a cell biologist at the UNC School of Medicine, was inspired by a string of events. He was educated in England, and before he came to UNC he worked at a research institute in Long Island called Cold Spring Harbor, where many conferences for people in the scientific research world were held.
One conference in particular stuck in his mind, where he was standing with a friend on a balcony overlooking cocktail hour.
“We were looking out at this sea of people,” he said. “We had this conversation, and it’s still vividly in my mind, and it was about how it’s like a circus.”
Each individual had their own parallel to a circus, Burridge said, “Some of the scientists and some of the junior people were juggling things, like juggling their data or others were walking a tightrope and you’re always worried.”
This image was particularly striking to him because a major scandal later came out of the conference, he said, where someone had doctored their data.
“I remember at that time, thinking ‘this is very dramatic,’” he said. “All the pressures they’re feeling, this would be fun really in a drama situation.”
He transformed this dramatic conference-turned-scandal into a play, and that’s what got him into the world of playwriting. “That had got me into writing a sort of play form, where I felt like I could have the various protagonists, antagonists, involved,” he said.
Since then, he’s written many more plays, including his most recent – which he just had a reading for at the Carborro ArtsCenter – called “The First Woman President,” about Woodrow Wilson’s wife Edith. “For me, I enjoy the playwriting because it’s, I think, a chance to sort of delve into history almost,” Burridge said.
While Burridge got into an artistic medium by a spur of the moment feeling, Michael Goy, another cell biologist at the UNC School of Medicine, had a longer-running fascination. His father was a scientist, and his mother was a musician. “For my whole life I’ve sort of had those two worlds cohabiting, co-habituating my own families,” he said.
He learned guitar when he was 13 and played on and off through his life as a student and as a professional. Now he plays in two bands: The Carburetors – a singer/songwriter, Americana-style band, and Red Nucleus – a duo that features finger-style guitar music and a bass guitar.
Carolyn Doyle, an immunologist at the Duke University School of Medicine, was introduced to ceramics through a pottery class, “I had never touched clay before and I thought it was the most wonderful thing in the world,” she said.
After she retired, pottery brought her a breath of fresh air. “Getting into the arts has been really wonderful,” she said, “because my life before used to be going from home, to Duke, from Duke to home, and that was sort of the extent of my life.”
Patricia Saling, an ex-professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University School of Medicine and now full-time potter, had the same kind of introduction. After she retired her husband (who happens to be Keith Burridge) got her a pottery class for Christmas.
Rudolph Juliano, a professor of pharmacology at the UNC School of Medicine, who also paints with watercolors, was introduced via class as well.
“I’ve always liked sort of drawing and things since I was a little kid – I guess when I moved to Chapel Hill many years ago, I wanted to follow up on that,” he said. “I took a watercolor class at the ArtsCenter in Chapel Hill, and that kind of got me intrigued.”
Finally, Jack Griffith, a microbiologist and immunologist at UNC School of Medicine, was the only one of the six whose scientific study brought him directly to an artistic medium. It was his job using electron microscopes to photograph DNA that led him to his passion in landscape photography. “That’s been a fun effort to kind of generate beautiful pictures in the scientific sense,” he said.
He’s published almost 1,000 photos of DNA in scientific journals, and they’ve even been featured at the Smithsonian. His casual photography includes numerous landscapes, from the Alaskan tundra to Chapel Hill.
“It’s been something that’s gone hand in hand,” he said. “In that understanding how to get good photographs and how to do the darkroom work is something I had to learn for the professional side of things.”
Fundamentalism
Art and science are portrayed as fundamentally different, and sometimes they are inherently different, according to Juliano’s justification for why he’s stuck with watercolor painting. “One of the things I like about watercolor painting is it’s so immediate,” he said.
It can be a breath of fresh air from the meticulous and drawn-out process of scientific research, he said.
“In my day job as a scientist, I get an idea, I do some experiments, I write a grant, it takes six months to be evaluated…so you’re lucky if you get five years between sort of creative inspiration and solution,” he said. “With watercolor painting, in an hour you know if you have a painting or not, so it’s very biometrical opposite of what I do in my research, so it’s very refreshing.”
Goy said he feels his music can be refreshing as well.
“It was a way of getting a different perspective from the kind of left-brained, linear, mathematical, quantitative thinking that I get as a scientist,” he said, “as a way to experience life in the world as a very different, and to me, a very energizing way.”
The Dichotomy
The types of art they all pursue are different in their own way, but seemingly not as inherently different as the arts and sciences. It’s that divide, however, that most of them felt was a fallacy. The dichotomy between the arts and the sciences exists, but only because of our preconceived notions, and fundamentally the way we’re wired, Burridge said.
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