My starting point for making art out of science
Illustrating my thoughts through out my PhD studies prompted me to practice exploring how visual art could contribute to the experience of appreciating nature
From my work on farms and nurseries in northern climates (before I started my PhD) I often wondered why annuals and perennials grew differently and flowered at different frequencies through out the year. For example, I watched annuals sprout and grow rapidly from seed, quickly reaching the four-leaf stage which meant they were ready for transplanting. Young perennials took longer to be ready to be moved to the ground or a new pot. When I took them out of their germination tray, I was always struck by the large size of their roots. Further, many annuals would make flowers all season long – especially if I cut off the old ones. It was as if the loss of a flower triggered the growth of another. Perennials on the other hand would flower at a predictable and finite time in the growing season and there was nothing I could do to change it.
I made this image as I was defining my focus for my dissertation work to describe why I chose to look at the genes that determine relative growth of plant tissues and patterns of senescence to understand evolutionary transitions between annual and perennial life cycles. The functional differences between short-lived annual and long-lived perennial plants are largely dependent on the extent to which leaf and plant senescence follows the production of flowers. Intrigued by the relationship between flower production and plant death, I realized that natural selection may act on the coordination of floral development and plant senescence to allow an annual to evolve from a perennial species, or vice versa. I have built much of my project around this idea.
My dissertation concerns molecular signatures of selection on life history in the genus Draba (Brassicaceae). The annual ancestors of the genus spread from lowland Iran into the high mountains of China adapting to high elevation by taking on a perennial lifespan. They then continued to colonize all circumpolar regions. As they speciated southward through the Americas they evolved multiple transitions between long and short life span. This image depicts the species relationships of my focus clade of north American Draba contains four independent transitions in life span and three instances ofallopolyploidy (two sets of chromosomes each derived from different hybridizing species). In my thesis I explore how genetic variation leads both to differences in the structure of expressed proteins and the amounts of proteins produced by leaf and floral tissue. To do my experiments, I spent summer months in the western Rocky Mountains to collect seed of these often rare and ephemeral species.
I made this image to highlight the species comparisons that will reveal the genetic connections underlying the energetic trade-offs between making either reproductive tissues (annual) or those that aid in long term survival (perennial). Furthermore, extra DNA in the alloploid species may allow these species to adapt more readily to new environments. This Draba clade allows me to investigate the long-standing question of how genomic architecture — e.g., the presence of more than two paired sets of chromosomes (polyploidy) due to either whole genome duplication (autopolyploidy) or hybridization (allopolypoidy) — could be linked to adaptation.
I created this image to present at the annual department retreat at Stony Brook University in February 2020. After I finished the Evolution of Food in the New Orleans Botanical Garden (posted in the BOTANICAL GARDENS section of this website) the October previous, many faculty and students assumed my art-work and research stood separate from each other. I made this figure to share with my department the motivations that connect my art-work to the year’s research that I was presenting.
Immediately after installing the paintings, I was conflicted about the time and energy I poured into the project rather than data analysis and reading scientific literature etc. that was expected of me as a student. After two months in solitude and engulfed in alpine areas, camping, hiking and conducting field work that summer, I spent August through October immersed in creating the exhibit in the NOLA botanical garden. Until I made this figure, I had a hard time articulating what the project meant for me as a scientist and how important it was for me to make the exhibit. By drawing the connections on paper, constantly rearranging and rephrasing the words and redrawing shapes of the lines I figured it out —for me, being a scientist is about sharing the beauty, drama and endless novelty we experience in nature together with the new discovery and knowledge that this wonder inspires us to uncover.
In the second year of my PhD (2018), a senior scientist who often shared his difficulties with students, was engaged in an intense period of grant submissions and began discussing his experience with inefficiencies of thinking and writing. My response was to offer my support, to listen to what was hard in that moment and discuss what patterns were playing a role in the difficulty. The conversation was interrupted and although I was offering a personal form of support and advice and critique (and later learned this is exactly how I was perceived), I left the conversation worried about the possibility that my offer was misinterpreted as an offer to help with the grant writing, which I felt so clearly unqualified.
I made this figure, to communicate that my offer of support came from my personal priority of providing emotional understanding to the people around me. Insecure about my initial communication, I first wanted to point out that I was not offering any help or guidance from my experience with grant writing. Then I wanted to show why I thought it was important that I provide an opportunity to explore the personal challenges that make life as a scientist difficult. Worried about the misunderstanding, I found myself peeling back the layers of what had prompted my offer and organizing them to make sure that this time my communication was clear. As the figure developed, I named categories to show what I thought was important about life as a scientist and assessed myself thoroughly using these metrics so that there could be no source of misunderstanding of my intention. Even though my worries about the conversation were unwarranted, I ended up making a map of what I felt was important about Life as a Scientist and defining how my interpersonal experiences could help me in science. Further, in making this figure I found (for the first time) that I could unite the art-work that comes from my desire to uncover personal perspective and motivations with the precision and objectivity of analysis.
Inspired by the brilliant women in my life the composition of ‘Conversations with Dana’ (painted while sharing long, dreamy and emotionally precise phone calls with my dearest friend as the year 2020 came to a close) expresses the sensuality and intimacy required for true connection to the natural world. The delicious arms and legs are wallowing in and growing out of the plants. The medicinal dandelion and lavender sit as a core amidst the extravagant peonies, all playing their role, all providing nutrients. The stable structure is held together as boundaries between the bodies of beauty, plant and human, have been blurred.
The structure and organization of nature is defined by the connections between its many moving and growing parts. While humans tend to separate ourselves from nature, insisting that we must play by different rules, acknowledging and embracing our relationship to the intertwined world around us gives purpose beyond what we have been told to do or what we have seen others do. To bring our own contribution to that effort, it is important that we question our priorities and make sure that they are our own.
What happens when we prioritize nurturing our own organic connections in our daily lives rather than aiming for our next completed task? Modern-day lifestyles promote a rush to productivity that leads many of us to experience anxious thoughts, anger, periods of depression and disengagement. When we are in these states of mind, we are separated from moments of surprise and intrigue. What parts of ourselves calm or disappear when we orient our days around developing what we find captivating and curious? What kinds of thoughts and emotions arise when we give ourselves time to explore our own connections to the world around us?
We each have a responsibility to interact with the outside world in a way that truly supports the world inside ourselves. We need this intimacy with nature to make observations and ask the kinds of questions that will reveal healing solutions to our future of pathogens, climate change, and the current confused definition of power and wealth. The innovation that is in our hearts’ connections will save our lives. Together in motion, in balance, we can stay forever blooming.
Oil on linen on the cutting board that came with me into the mountains for my field work in 2019 <3
Which garden do you want to grow in? In Spring 2021, I was given the opportunity to teach a Plant Diversity course. Mostly due to COVID -19 precautions, the typical lab project and write up became impossible. I was excited to fill this space in the curriculum with an art project that encouraged students to follow their intrinsic curiosities about course material and develop their own thoughts and connections to plants. This process was meant to create a space for students to embrace their own impulses of connection between themselves and the rest of the natural world. I created this image to go with the rubric where I graded them on the integrity of their self exploration as well as their understanding of the plant evolution and diversity. My hope was that they might understand that the criteria for their grade was the extent to which they developed their own thoughts and reflections.
So often in the academic stetting, individual thought is criticized and questioned as it deviates from expectations. Due to the fast pace of information intake and test taking, there is rarely an opportunity to develop unique ideas and connections. This leads to an idea that uniformity is the only thing that can be valued. As a result, students are often unable to fully realize that the things that make them different from others are also what makes them capable of contributing something new and innovative. I hoped to give students an opportunity to trust their intuition and develop it into something expressive by learning to follow their own desires and ideals.
Exploring the intersection of art and science at the Botany workshop Anchorage AK, 2022: When I let the seeds inside of me grow.
In 2021, I gathered a group of fellow art loving botanists to work with on my mission of uniting art and science, we call ourselves the SciArt collective. The first time we ran a workshop together was at the botany conference in Anchorage AK, in 2022. The workshop summary highlighted the ways that art making can help communicate science and the importance of creativity in scientific practice. I took on the role of delivering the introduction of our philosophy and found myself crafting this portion in Alaska while camping in the mountains for my field work in 10 days of pouring rain. I had originally intended to make regular slides— with text boxes and bullet points, but the typical aversion to my computer at that point of my field season was made much worse by the rain, so I made water-color paintings that expressed the ways I had learn to identify my creative processes. My intention was to provide examples that workshop attendees could build from to identify their own processes. This image captures the ways I had stifled my creative processes. My training to try to fit into the academic environment had me always looking outside of myself for ideas. Being ashamed of anything that arose from my own mind or heart or belly, they would often shrivel and decompose shortly after sprouting. I did not even know that the impulses I sensed were anything other than uncomfortable distractions from what I was reading or hearing. SLOWLY I started to learn that those little eruptions were my own original thoughts and ideas, then I learned how to nurture them enough to let them grow. Not only did they grow and make the own flowers (in my work or in conversation), I also became more vibrant as the process of learning to care of my ideas shaped me.