Once Upon a Time: four stories without an end (second page)
Now on to my second story: In 1996, artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey were creating extraordinary living grass photographs.
Unfortunately, these images lost their greenness fairly quickly. The artists became aware of the work of the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research (IGER) through publicity about scientific research on staygreen grass. They visited Howard (Sid) Thomas, Head of Cell Biology, and Helen Ougham, Pricipal Research Scientist at IGER, Aberystwyth to explore the possibility that the use of staygreen grass would preserve their images longer than conventional grass. The artists and scientists immediately struck up a close personal rapport and began to develop ideas for a collaboration which they called FIXING THE EPHEMERAL.
In this story, too, a Sci-Art Award acted as a catalyst in bringing artists and scientists together. As a first stage, it enabled Heather and Dan to work as artists in residence
at IGER.
Sid Thomas has total recall of what then happened at the point when the artists first demonstrated their grass photographs:
“At that point the realisation dawned that the visual information in the work resides not just in the distribution of shades of pigmentation but also in the textures, orientation and nearest-neighbour interactions of the individual plants. This in turn led us to new insights into the interactions between vegetation and the light environment.”
It’s interesting, by comparison, to hear Heather and Dan’s view on this same revelatory meeting:
“The subtlety and range of tonal colour captured in our grass photographs made a big impression on our science colleagues and, in a remarkable shift in perception, they realised that observations of plant material could occur in very different circumstances than the established investigative paths, which involved grinding up leaves and subjecting them to various kinds of separation.”
This new awakening at IGER, which both the artists and scientists remember so vividly, can best be described, I think, as a ‘catalysing moment’. You will see, as I develop my theme (and my stories), that catalysing moments, of one type or another, are common to all successful Sci-Art partnerships. There has to be a time when each partner contributes in equal measure to the idea which, from then on, forms the basis of on-going project development. This idea can never emerge from a single source; it has to be a mutual moment of inspiration and, for this reason, I believe it represents a new type of Creativity, which we can now recognise and evaluate as a direct result of the Sci-Art experiment.
In AFTER IMAGE, the catalysing moment occurred during the initial five hour meeting
I’ve already described. Alexa’s life took on a new course from that time onwards. Similarly, at IGER, nothing was the same again after Heather and Dan’s demonstration
of grass images; Sid and Helen adopted new methods of investigating the molecular indices of leaf death through non-invasive high resolution imaging – a change of direction which has had a radical impact on the fortunes of IGER. I will continue the story of FIXING THE EPHEMERAL later but, for the moment, let me introduce two further stories to you.
FIXING THE EPHEMERAL, ‘Testament’,
Large scale living grass photograph,
Ice House, Hull. Heather Ackroyd & Dan Harvey
FIXING THE EPHEMERAL ‘Stoma’,
Living grass photograph
Heather Ackroyd & Dan Harvey