July 2020 – Art for Democracy, the Solstice, and the Pandemic

IS IT ART?

by Grace Blackshaw

Art is often characterized as the antithesis of science. Stereotypes would have us believe artists are creative, chaotic, free spirits, working in messy studios. Scientists, by contrast, are logical, methodical and work in spotless laboratories, full of neatly labelled chemicals most of us have never heard of. The reality, of course, is far more complex.

Xavier Cortada has long been interested in creating what he describes as ‘science art’, often also using his work to raise awareness of environmental concerns.

In 2007, Cortada visited Antarctica and ‘planted’ a replica of a mangrove seedling in the moving ice sheet, to spend the next 150,000 years moving with the ice sheet and symbolising the passage of time. He also created a series of Ice Paintings using ice and sediment samples.

In 2013, Cortada collaborated with physicist Pete Markowitz on an art installation to celebrate the discovery of the Higgs Boson. The five panels each represent one of the experiments used by scientists at CERN to confirm its existence.

The piece is an ode to both the science and the human effort required for an experiment on this scale. In the second panel, the Higgs Boson is shown decaying into two photons and in the third, into quarks. The background of the panels includes 383 pages from scientific publications and the names of the 4000 scientists, engineers and technicians who worked on the project.

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Image above: In Search of Higgs Boson – produced in collaboration with physicist Pete Markowitz, celebrating the discovery of the Higgs boson particle.