On March 16th, I took a workshop at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco exploring the intersection of art and science through nature. Before attending the workshop, I wondered: can art help us learn about the science of the natural world? Can science support the creation of powerful art? Are there substantive, meaningful connections between art and science? As someone passionate about the arts and sciences, two seemingly incompatible disciplines, this workshop introduced me to the important concept of "emergence". Emergence is where something unpredictable or unexpected arises from a collection of individual components or parts. In art, a particular painting might look one way zoomed in but reveal a larger picture once we zoom out. The same goes for nature; we can focus on things on a microscopic level but once we zoom out, we learn a different story about the natural world. Here are some highlights of the workshop:
We took a walk through GG and were tasked with finding a space on the trail and creating art out of objects found in nature. I created a sculpture out of sticks and twigs.
We painted with vegetable and fruit pigments and passed our paintings around the table in a clockwise sequence every couple of minutes until something completely new and unique was created at the very end. There was an element of serendipity since your art could be covered up by the next person or added to in an interesting way.
Overall, this workshop was fun and engaging. I walked away with the reminder that we should take science learning outdoors. We are so lucky to have nature right outside our window at Burke's and I am eager to see how we could plan labs around environmental sampling or nature journaling.