‘Scales of Life’ to open gallery at £26million Discovery Centre

Published On Thu 2 Oct 2014 by Grant Hill

A major exhibition of work from leading contemporary artists will this weekend go on display at Scotland’s first dedicated art-science gallery, located within a new £26million research centre at the University of Dundee.

‘Scales of Life’ is the inaugural exhibition in LifeSpace, part of the Discovery Centre (for Translational and Interdisciplinary Research), which was this week opened by Nobel Laureate Sir Paul Nurse. The unique gallery will host up to four major exhibitions each year, showcasing the best in collaborations between artists and scientists.

Featuring new and existing art works by Thomson & Craighead, Elaine Shemilt, Tabitha Moses and Helen Chadwick, alongside artefacts from the University's collections, the exhibition shows how visual artists have represented the fundamental scales of life - from molecules to organelles to cells to tissue.

Curator Sarah Cook said, “Artists play a vital role in engaging with the issues of our time, whether those are political, economic, cultural or scientific. We have seen an increasing number of exciting collaborations and residencies taking place in recent years where artists are not just making science ‘pretty’ but are complicating our understanding of how science works.

“As such we are delighted to be hosting the first gallery in Scotland dedicated to the critical edges of the interface between art and science. Scales of Life focuses on how scientific research into biological components is the basis of the understanding and treatment of many diseases, yet these artworks, made from materials as diverse as embroidery or digital video, present other ways of picturing scientific knowledge.”

The Discovery Centre is home to researchers supported by over £31million of research grants, bringing the investment in the total operation to well over £57million. Its front facade features large anodised aluminium cladding panels incorporating artistic abstractions representative of four key scales of Life Science research – a permanent work of art created by Professor Elaine Shemilt of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) in collaboration with Professor Mike Ferguson of the College of Life Sciences.

For the exhibition, Professor Shemilt has continued with her translation of scientific images into artwork using embossing and transference inks to make prints on paper.

Two of the other exhibiting artists, Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, are graduates of DJCAD, part of the University. The visual artists held a major and critically acclaimed show at Dundee Contemporary Arts last year and their Scales of Life piece, ‘Stutterer’, is a newly commissioned work supported by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award created from the source code of the human genome.

A DNA sequence drives a database of video footage found online, that represents global events from across the thirteen year period it took scientists to first sequence the genome (approx 1990-2003). The work is both in part a poetry generating machine and a monument, in that it would take over fifty years for it to run through the entire sequence.

Tabitha Moses, an artist based in Liverpool and winner of the Liverpool Art Prize, is showing work she made as a response to working with sufferers of skin conditions such as eczema and psoriasis. Her objects are seductive and repellent in equal measure and draw on her long experience of working with textiles.

The exhibition also includes a work from the estate of Helen Chadwick, one of her “Viral Landscapes” series where magnified cells from her own body are combined with photographic images of the coastline. Chadwick’s work is an important early example of mixed media which addresses the divide between mind and body, flesh and machine, human and nature.

Scales of Life opens with a preview evening on Friday, 3rd October and runs until 11th January 2015. Artists’ talks and a curator’s tour will take place on 4th and 8th November at 3pm. LifeSpace is open on Saturdays from 11am-5pm, and otherwise by appointment only. It is accessed from the side entrance to the College of Life Sciences at the top of Old Hawkhill Road.

More information is available at www.lifespace.dundee.ac.uk.   

Notes to editors:

About the Wellcome Trust

The Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving extraordinary improvements in human and animal health. It supports the brightest minds in biomedical research and the medical humanities. The Trust’s breadth of support includes public engagement, education and the application of research to improve health. It is independent of both political and commercial interests.

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