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.
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.
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’.
“Complexity is the underlying focus of my work. My work is not rigidly representational but rather it’s suggestive of the very real and very complicated parts and systems that compose and surround us but that cannot be seen by the naked eye. Using motifs from microbiology, I experiment with material, scale, and replication to create abstract biomorphs of vivid color, hyper-texture, and dedicated detail.”
Drawing on her experience with ceramics, fabric, and sculpture, Amie Esslinger’s paintings and distinctive mixed-media installations attempt to bridge the gap between art and science.
Werner Sun is a visual artist who lives and works in Ithaca, NY. A particle physicist by training, he makes folded paper constructions that investigate the role of pattern and abstraction in the everyday acts of observing and knowing. Werner’s practice combines elements of sculpture, photography, coding, digital printmaking, drawing, and collage.
Dr Priya Subramanian is a Research Fellow at the Department of Mathematics, University of Leeds. Her interests lie in understanding mechanisms that govern spatio-temporal patterns and emergent behaviours in systems such as thermacoustic systems, transistional (convective/shear) flows of fluids and motion of active organelle filaments. Currently, she is looking at formation of quasipatterns; patterns that possess discrete spectra despite having no translational symmetries.
Dr Iris Salecker is program leader in the Division of Molecular Neurobiology at the Medical Research Council National Institute for Medical Research in London (now part of the Francis Crick Institute). Her current team studies the mechanisms underlying visual circuit assembly in Drosophila, with a special interest in axon-target and neuron-glia interactions. In this exclusive interview she discusses her ideas and work, and her collaborative project with artist, Helen Pynor, for the ‘Deconstructing Patterns’ exhibition.
“The materialist worldview, which has dominated science and academia over the last few centuries, has run its course. At last the tired old materialist paradigm has started to crumble, and a new paradigm has begun to emerge.”
Mario Beauregard, PhD., is a neuroscientist currently affiliated with the Department of Psychology, University of Arizona. He was the first neuroscientist to use neuroimaging to investigate the neural underpinnings of conscious and voluntary emotion regulation. Because of his research into the neuroscience of consciousness, he was selected (2000) by the World Media Net to be one of the “One Hundred Pioneers of the 21st Century.” In addition, his groundbreaking research on the neurobiology of spiritual experiences has received international media coverage, and a documentary film has been produced about his work (The Mystical Brain, 2007).
A review essay about ‘Harmonious Complexity, An Exhibition Celebrating 100 Years of On Growth and Form’, in which writer and educator, Charissa Terranova, discusses the work and legacy of Scottish zoologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson.
Jasper Sharp is a writer, curator and filmmaker. He is the co-director of The Creeping Garden (2014) and the author of The Creeping Garden: Irrational Encounters with Plasmodial Slime Moulds (Alchimia, 2015).