Painting Energies - Artscience podcast by Aalto University
Painting Energies
10 episodes
8 months ago
In this episode, we talked to the Australian installation artist Janet Laurence. Janne met her when he was a visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Janet's practice focuses on creating immersive experiences that bring people into an intimate relationship with nature. She is known for her work with plants, which highlights not only their beauty but also their fragility and the need for care and empathy to protect the environment. Her work is diverse, spanning from large-scale installations in forests and ecosystems, to sculptures, and even video and sound pieces. Entangled Garden for Plant Memory, Yu-Hsiu Museum, Taiwan (2020), After Nature, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2019), and Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France (2015) are recent examples of her work and exhibitions that relate to our conversation.
Janet tells about her way of working with scientists and researchers, and about her art installations consisting of samples from the vast animal and plant collections of natural history museums. We discuss the controversial feelings they evoke at the border between life and death, preserved but lost. Janne wonders if living nature itself is, to sapiens, like a natural history museum: a collection of increasingly rare species preserved at the brink of extinction.
Janet and Bart share their views on the role of art: could it be conceived as a powerful tool for behavioural change? This leads us to compare the different approaches by scientists and artists in presenting work and questioning: one obsessed in finding answers and solutions, the other avoiding them at all cost; the art of enquiry.
We end the conversation with Janet telling about her upcoming work with researchers of the Antarctic, spells for weather, and the plants in her new garden.
More about Janet: https://www.janetlaurence.com/
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In this episode, we talked to the Australian installation artist Janet Laurence. Janne met her when he was a visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Janet's practice focuses on creating immersive experiences that bring people into an intimate relationship with nature. She is known for her work with plants, which highlights not only their beauty but also their fragility and the need for care and empathy to protect the environment. Her work is diverse, spanning from large-scale installations in forests and ecosystems, to sculptures, and even video and sound pieces. Entangled Garden for Plant Memory, Yu-Hsiu Museum, Taiwan (2020), After Nature, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2019), and Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France (2015) are recent examples of her work and exhibitions that relate to our conversation.
Janet tells about her way of working with scientists and researchers, and about her art installations consisting of samples from the vast animal and plant collections of natural history museums. We discuss the controversial feelings they evoke at the border between life and death, preserved but lost. Janne wonders if living nature itself is, to sapiens, like a natural history museum: a collection of increasingly rare species preserved at the brink of extinction.
Janet and Bart share their views on the role of art: could it be conceived as a powerful tool for behavioural change? This leads us to compare the different approaches by scientists and artists in presenting work and questioning: one obsessed in finding answers and solutions, the other avoiding them at all cost; the art of enquiry.
We end the conversation with Janet telling about her upcoming work with researchers of the Antarctic, spells for weather, and the plants in her new garden.
More about Janet: https://www.janetlaurence.com/
#6 Old stubborn tensions: the work(ings) and the about(ings) - with Alexandra Wettlaufer
Painting Energies - Artscience podcast by Aalto University
1 hour 12 minutes 8 seconds
3 years ago
#6 Old stubborn tensions: the work(ings) and the about(ings) - with Alexandra Wettlaufer
In this episode, our guest is Professor of French and Comparative Literature Alexandra K. Wettlaufer (University of Texas and Austin, College of Liberal Arts). She specializes in 19th-century literature, visual arts, culture, and gender studies and has written various books on these topics*. It is in particular her paper `The Sublime Rivalry of Word and Image: Turner and Ruskin Revisited´ that ignited our conversation. Alexandra explains how Turner was trying to reproduce the experience of seeing and feeling, rather than reproducing the topography or an image. He was very much about what was not there. That we have to add to it our own imagination to bring it closer to the way we experience the world. Through his paintings, like Snowstorm…, Turner and many contemporaries wanted to translate a feeling into a certain context. Not to show what was there, but to evoke a feeling in the viewer. A shift away from the Cartesian ideas of knowledge, to Locke and the idea of experience. In the first half of the 20th Century that was an important shift in the aesthetic and scientific language and ethos.
So, what the artists wanted to do was to find a way to evoke or invoke in the reader or viewer an experience that is at once individual and universal. Baudelaire said about one of Delacroix‘ paintings that you can stand so far away that you can’t see what the painting is representing. But you still understand it because the colours are giving you the feeling. Alexandra thinks that is exactly what Turner is doing in his paintings that are not highly representative. This tension between the artwork and the use of language in and around it is still very contemporary, an ever-spinning thread in many art_science, art communication, and curatorial practices.
Alexandra stresses the importance of how art represents and disrupts hegemonic forces and powers. She likes disrupters like Turner, who wanted to make us see in different ways. As did women artists, as did Baudelaire. It is Innovation, it is the movement against what is expected. It looks like a mess. We learn to see, that is the other thing, seeing is learned, and it is a discipline. Janne adds that it is similar in science: there is accepted science, and then you have those who are crazy enough to think and do entirely differently, against the rules.
* References in the conversation
Wettlaufer, Alexandra K. "The sublime rivalry of word and image: Turner and Ruskin revisited." Victorian Literature and Culture 28.1 (2000): 149-169.
Derrida, Jacques, and Avital Ronell. "The law of genre." Critical inquiry 7.1 (1980): 55-81.
Campagna, Federico. Technic and magic: The reconstruction of reality. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.
More about Alexandra: https://experts.utexas.edu/alexandra_wettlaufer
Painting Energies - Artscience podcast by Aalto University
In this episode, we talked to the Australian installation artist Janet Laurence. Janne met her when he was a visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Janet's practice focuses on creating immersive experiences that bring people into an intimate relationship with nature. She is known for her work with plants, which highlights not only their beauty but also their fragility and the need for care and empathy to protect the environment. Her work is diverse, spanning from large-scale installations in forests and ecosystems, to sculptures, and even video and sound pieces. Entangled Garden for Plant Memory, Yu-Hsiu Museum, Taiwan (2020), After Nature, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2019), and Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France (2015) are recent examples of her work and exhibitions that relate to our conversation.
Janet tells about her way of working with scientists and researchers, and about her art installations consisting of samples from the vast animal and plant collections of natural history museums. We discuss the controversial feelings they evoke at the border between life and death, preserved but lost. Janne wonders if living nature itself is, to sapiens, like a natural history museum: a collection of increasingly rare species preserved at the brink of extinction.
Janet and Bart share their views on the role of art: could it be conceived as a powerful tool for behavioural change? This leads us to compare the different approaches by scientists and artists in presenting work and questioning: one obsessed in finding answers and solutions, the other avoiding them at all cost; the art of enquiry.
We end the conversation with Janet telling about her upcoming work with researchers of the Antarctic, spells for weather, and the plants in her new garden.
More about Janet: https://www.janetlaurence.com/
