The Sci-Art Business: Some Reflections | Professor Martin Kemp & Katharine Dowson | Monday 30 November 2015, 12.30pm
Katharine Dowson, Silent Stories, courtesy of GV Art, London
The Sci-Art Business: Some Reflections | Professor Martin Kemp & Katharine Dowson | Monday 30 November 2015, 12.30pm
The Sci-Art Business: Some Reflections
Emeritus Professor Martin Kemp & artist Katharine Dowson
Free lunchtime lecture
Monday 30 November 2015, 12.30pm
Wolfson Seminar Room
Oxford Chemistry Research Laboratory
South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UB
Places can be reserved Eventbrite at http://martinjkemp30nov.eventbrite.co.uk
Can collaboration between artists and scientists help us to acquire new perspectives and/or a broader understanding of the cultural context of scientific work, and who benefits most?
Professor Martin Kemp, broadcaster and author of many publications on art and science will reflect on these questions in his talk “The Sci-Art Business: Some Reflections” at a lunchtime seminar in the Chemistry Research Laboratory.
After the seminar you are invited to view sculptures by artist Katharine Dowson and meet her to learn more about her practice.
The event will be hosted by the Department of Chemistry and introduced by Professor Chris Schofield, Head of Organic Chemistry.
Researchers in the Chemistry Department are working to find new ways to combat cancer. As part of a public engagement project for Oxford Open Doors, the Department is host to a series of works by the artist Katharine Dowson, whose sculptures of radiotherapy patients are displayed in the foyer of the Chemistry Research Laboratory.
Martin Kemp was trained in Natural Sciences and Art History at Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute, London. His books include, The Science of Art. Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (Yale), and The Human Animal in Western Art and Science (Chicago). He has published and broadcast extensively on Leonardo da Vinci, including the prize-winning Leonardo da Vinci. The marvellous works of nature and man and Leonardo (both Oxford). His Christ to Coke. How image becomes icon (Oxford) looks at 11 representatives of types of icons across a wide range of public imagery. He wrote regularly for Nature for more than 10 years, his essays for which have been published as Visualizations and developed in Seen and Unseen (both Oxford) in which his concept of “structural intuitions” is explored. After writing a history of Trinity College Chapel, his most recent book is Art in History (Profile Books).
Martin has been a Trustee of the National Galleries of Scotland, The Victoria and Albert Museum and British Museum. He has curated and co-curated a series of exhibitions on Leonardo and other themes, including Spectacular Bodies at the Hayward Gallery in London, Leonardo da Vinci. Experience, Experiment, Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2006 and Seduced. Sex and Art from Antiquity to Now, Barbican Art Gallery London, 2007. He is now a full-time speaker, writer and broadcaster.
Katharine Dowson studied sculpture at the Royal College of Art and her work has been exhibited in the UK, USA, Brazil, Europe and Asia in both private and public collections including the Wellcome Trust and the Arts Council Collection. Amongst her many other commissions, she created work for the groundbreaking shows Spectacular Bodies, A History of Anatomical Art from Leonardo to Now at The Hayward Gallery and Head On: Art with the Brain in Mind at the Science Museum for the Wellcome Trust. Katharine is a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, and two of her pieces from Silent Stories were included in the 2015 Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. Katharine is represented by GV Art, London.
www.katharinedowson.com and www.artofsavingalife.com
TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities is an interdisciplinary research centre based within the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford. It stimulates supports and promotes research activity of the very highest quality that transcends disciplinary and institutional boundaries and engages with wider audiences. The acting director of TORCH is Elleke Boehmer (Professor of World Literature, University of Oxford).
For additional information see: http://torch.ox.ac.uk/
GV Art is the UK’s leading contemporary art gallery which aims to explore and acknowledge the inter-relationship between art and science, and how the areas cross over and inform one another. The gallery curates exhibitions and events that stimulate a dialogue focused on how modern society interprets and understands the advances in both areas and how an overlap in the technological and the creative, the medical and the historical are paving the way for new aesthetic sensibilities to develop.
