Connections and Convergence
Issue 89 June 2025

Ludwika Ogorzelec: Shape in Time
The material of Ludwika Ogorzelec’s sculptures is space itself, and the line of wood, metal or glass is only the contour for the “crystals of space”. Her works are usually created in reference to the context of the cultures and places in which they are presented, most often in situ (in open space, often in architecturally shaped surroundings, in the interiors of exhibition halls of museums and galleries). In this interview with art and ecology author, John K. Grande, she discusses her ideas and work.

Floating Body
Siobhán McDonald is an Irish artist based in Dublin. In a practice that emphasizes field work and collaboration she works with natural materials, withdrawing them from their cycles of generation, growth and decay. Through painting, film, sound and sculpture McDonald explores Dublin Port as a gateway of exchange—reimagined as a porous space of interspecies cohabitation. This haunting journey along the wetland—located on the edges of the port—is a breathing, living system that is able to respond to sea level rise.

Fragments Aligned
Sohrab Crews’ experience of a range of different geographical and cultural contexts has had a strong bearing on his work, as has his significant interest in post-war European avant-garde art, American painting and sculpture, and mixed-media practices of all kinds. His own work manifests the recurrent themes of order and control, structure, colour and expressive intensity, notably through his ongoing experimentation with a wide range of ideas, mediums and techniques.

FRACTALS – the sacred geometry of divine oneness
Sabahat Fida is a lecturer in Zoology with the Higher Education Department in Kashmir. With academic training spanning in both the sciences (MSc Zoology) and the humanities (MA Philosophy), her work seeks to bridge the realms of science, metaphysics, religion, and philosophy.

Gayle Chong Kwan: Oneiric Archaeologies
Gayle Chong Kwan is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and academic whose work is exhibited internationally in galleries and the public realm. Her large-scale photographic works, immersive installations, and sensory ritual events are at the intersection of historical and archival research and fine art practice, and position the viewer as one element in a cosmology of the political, social and ecological. She has created a new installation work, ‘Oneiric Archaeologies’, in VR game design, sound, tactile wearable sculptures, and social dreaming to explore the collective re-shaping, re-use, and understanding of Avebury Neolithic site through dreaming.

MSU: Power Up Artist-in-Residence program and What Happens When Nuclear Physics and Dance Collide
Arts MSU at Michigan State University and The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) have been collaborating, bringing art and science together with a Power Up Artist-in-Residence program resulting in cutting-edge artworks and exhibitions that push the boundaries of both disciplines.

Extraterrestrial life may look nothing like life on Earth − so astrobiologists are coming up with a framework to study how complex systems evolve
Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. He has over 180 refereed publications on observational cosmology, galaxies, and quasars, and his research has been supported by $20 million in NASA and NSF grants. He has won eleven teaching awards, and has taught three massive open online classes with over 180,000 enrolled. Impey is a past Vice President of the American Astronomical Society and he has been an NSF Distinguished Teaching Scholar, Carnegie Council’s Arizona Professor of the Year, and most recently, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. He’s written over 70 popular articles on cosmology and astrobiology, two introductory textbooks, a novel called ‘Shadow World’, and eight popular science books: ‘The Living Cosmos’, ‘How It Ends’, ‘Talking About Life’, ‘How It Began’, ‘Dreams of Other Worlds’, ‘Humble Before the Void’, ‘Beyond: The Future of Space Travel’, and ‘Einstein’s Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes’.

Mathematics of scale: Big, small and everything in between
Mitchell Newberry is a Research Assistant Professor of Biology, University of New Mexico. He is a computational biologist and complex systems scientist whose research spans population dynamics, the evolution of language and culture, the maintenance of diversity in ecosystems, and vascular morphology, while contributing to the nuts and bolts of software and statistics. His work appears in Nature, Physical Review Letters, Royal Society Interface and Theoretical Population Biology as well as Popular Science, Buzzfeed and the Atlantic.

Mandelbrot’s fractals are not only gorgeous – they taught mathematicians how to model the real world
Polina Vytnova is a Lecturer in Mathematics, University of Surrey
Polina received her MSc from the Independent University of Moscow and PhD from the University of Warwick. After temporary research positions at Queen Mary University of London, Brown University, and University of Warwick she joined the Department of Mathematics University of Surrey as a lecturer in pure mathematics.
Her research covers a broad range of topics in general area of Dynamical Systems. She enjoys bringing together different branches of mathematics such as Number Theory, Fractal Geometry and Analysis, applying methods from one of them to problems in another.

Art illuminates the beauty of science – and could inspire the next generation of scientists young and old
Chris Curran is Professor and Director Neuroscience Program, Northern Kentucky University
“I received my PhD in Environmental Genetics & Molecular Toxicology with a focus on genetic susceptibility to developmental neurotoxicants. I trained under Dr. Daniel Nebert and continue to benefit from the knockout mice he generously donated while starting an independent research career at Northern Kentucky University. I am also grateful to NIEHS which has funded our research here at NKU and supported nearly 100 undergraduates directly or indirectly over the last 12 years. I am past president of the Society for Birth Defects Research and Prevention and represent BDRP on the FASEB Board of Directors. I also service as a Councilor for the Society of Toxicology and the Developmental Neurotoxicology Society.”