SciArt Magazine - All Issues December 2015 | Page 10

STRAIGHT TALK

with Rebecca Kamen

Rebecca Kamen is a visual artist who
explores topics including biology,
cosmology, philosophy, and history. Using
science as a point of inspiration, Kamen
creates sculptures and installations out of
Mylar. Exhibiting internationally, Kamen
is currently a professor emeritus of art at
Northern Virginia Community College and
a leading advocate for STEM education.

By Julia Buntaine
Editor-in-Chief
JB: Before we talk about your art, I’d love to hear a bit from
you about how you view the role of art and creativity in understanding science.
RK: Art and science share much in common. Both
fields engage in creative problem solving, discover truths
related to the notions of aesthetics and beauty, and utilize visualization to make the invisible visible.
Creativity is about problem solving—and those scientists whom I’ve really connected with are those who are
creative thinkers. They tend to be universal investigators. They don’t limit themselves to one small area; instead they tend to look at what they are doing in relation
to bigger pictures. Creativity in art and science is also
about discovery. I can spend hours in my studio trying to
solve a problem conceptually before I physically manifest it. It’s like chemistry; the notion of transforming
materials.
Before the advent of the camera, scientists were
natural philosophers who looked more holistically at
nature and the universe, using drawing and painting as a
way of capturing and recording their observations. My
work reconnects scientists to this original way of seeing
and experiencing natural phenomena. I have an innate
understanding of science, and using my art to interpret
scientific discoveries often fascinates scientists. Several
have commented on how the artwork captures the aesthetic aspect of science observed in the complexity of a

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visual pattern or the beauty found in a series of numbers
describing a scientific truth.
Many years ago, I was lecturing to a group of chemists and one of them said, “astrophysicists have all those
beautiful Hubble photographs but as chemists we don’t
have those kinds of beautiful things.” I told the group
that they had something even more extraordinary as
their field deals with transformation. As a chemist, you
may investigate how when chemicals come together they
transform into something totally different—and that’s
beautiful. A chemist e–mailed me after seeing some
images from my Divining Nature: An Elemental Garden
project on the Periodic table of elements. She said,
“Thank you. I never thought of what I did as a chemist
as being beautiful.” Her words struck me because many
other scientists that I meet do talk about their work in
relationship to beauty—a beautiful equation, for example. There is a wonderful aesthetic sense to science that
appears when I’m talking to scientists; because they’re
conversing with an artist, perhaps it’s sometimes okay
for them to think about their work or explain their work
as being beautiful.
JB: As an artist, you have addressed topics from neuroscience
to physics, astronomy, chemistry, and fluid mechanics, to name a
few. What drives you towards science as a subject matter?
RK: An immense curiosity and the process of discovery
act as catalysts for the development of my artwork.

SciArt in America December 2015