Art and science - together yet apart

 

Two-handed time-keeper (combined Exeter and Letchworth) | 2021 | Still from 3m digital video

Both artists and scientists research things. We share a deep curiosity about the world around us, and a strong drive to relay our understanding to others. We carry out experiments, share the results in public forums and encourage critique and review from our peers. So why is it, when we get together in so-called sci-art collaborations, the result is so often creatively (and critically) disappointing?

I was thinking about this when I joined an Axis round-table discussion  'Crossing the Art-Science Divide' with Karina Thompson and Diana Scarborough on 3rd November - and saw my own struggles reflected in theirs. The way that an artist is almost an afterthought at the end of a scientific research project, brought in to ensure the public engagement box can be ticked on a report form. Often paid very little - or sometimes nothing at all - they will be expected to illustrate the research, document the process or run a themed family workshop. The idea of the artist having any kind of critical or creative input into the actual research is completely sidelined.

Don't get me wrong. I've worked with some brilliant, generous, creative, interested scientists. But my hopes for genuine co-creation have rarely or only vaguely materialised. It's been more like cooperation than collaboration. It doesn't help that the funding almost always comes from a scientific or commercial backer, not from an arts organisation. The artist is a junior partner, expected to fit around the institutional agenda and contribute something innocuous but evidential. Whatever individual artists and scientists might aspire to is swept away in the frantic race to deliver the research outputs and impacts that secure future funding.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but I wonder if embedding artists in scientific research organisations is the wrong approach - tempting though the 'fellowships' and other small pots of money can be. Perhaps we'd be more useful standing outside the scientific establishment, looking on with a critical eye.

 

Futility Counter

Gabrielle Hoad | Zebrafish | 2021| WIP on bestiary of human-entangled species

In her book The Case for Quitting, Lindsay Crouse argues that we need to start viewing quitting as a tool of perseverance, rather than the enemy of it. She points to research with zebrafish: when they encounter a strong current, they respond with a surge of effort but, if that doesn’t work, they give up. This is judged by specialised cells in their brains that scientists call 'futility counters'. Zebrafish instinctively follow these cues because they support survival, but humans have learned to override them.

It's now 20 years since I graduated from art school with quite realistic ambitions to work for money part-time and pursue my art career with the hours I had left. I never expected to show in Tate Modern but I did expect to generate a steady stream of interesting opportunities and, between about 2011 and 2022, that seemed to be happening. But, for the last three years or so, I have definitely been swimming hard against the current, getting older and getting nowhere, and feeling more and more exhausted.

As funding and places to work shrink, it's ever more important for artists to support each other and generate their own opportunities. So it's ironic that I find myself quitting a number of networks...often because they are so sprawling and 'inclusive' as to be meaningless. Once my home studio is up and running, I am committed to having one last surge of effort. But after that, I might be turning around and going with the flow. 

Rehearsing for our life as peasants

Images from TOAST magazine

I have great faith in artists as seers, attuned to the coming storm. So what are we to make of the absolute deluge of art that seems to be a rehearsal for post-apocalyptic life? Here we all are weaving, basket-making, hand-building clay vessels, making plant dyes, drawing with natural pigments, growing food, seed saving, fermenting, preserving, sewing banners, making totems and charms, and inventing new 'folk' rituals. Artists have become makers; craft is the new contemporary art. 

I went to the Exeter Contemporary Open 2026 this week and it took me a while to realise that the space felt so calm and inviting because it contained only silent images and objects. No speakers, no screens, no flickering lights or moving parts: a survey of contemporary art practice that had completely sidelined digital. 

I don't blame the selectors. AI is like a plague at the moment, tainting all that's joyful and original and human about art. To turn away from digital and a life dominated by screens feels quite radical. But digital is also part of our current human condition, and rejecting it to focus on creating on some imaginary rural idyll seems a little naive.

Because there is also something painfully privileged about all this. It's all chore jackets and waffle knits and £10 artisanal loaves. You can't grow and preserve food or mess about with buckets of dye or operate a kiln while working a zero hours contract and living in a bedsit. Slow living is for people with the luxury of space and time. It's also for when we need to turn away from the state we're actually in.

I love a bit of tactile textile or a spot of punkish Morris dancing as much as the next person, but I don't kid myself that it's going to be much help when the tech bros have extracted all the money and we are left fighting over the (contaminated) land.

My brilliant (other) career

What the world becomes | 2006 | Live action and mixed media installation over 13 windows

I sometimes wonder what kind of artist I'd be today if I'd had access to the dedicated studio space I promised myself - and indeed strove to create back in the 2000s.

It's a common mantra among artists that it's best to work with what's close to hand: that limited resources of time, money, materials, space or even physical capability need not hold back the truly creative individual.

And indeed, having little or no studio space has become normal for me, from the meagre 2-3 metres of wall space I was allocated at college until the present time. These days I work on location, on my computer and on my kitchen table. 

I did try to make a difference. Around 2006, seeing the very limited options for affordable studio space in my city, I spent two years working really hard with other artists on setting up a shared studio building in the city centre and a Community Interest Company to run it. I had a whole 150 square feet to myself for just £79 pcm, all inclusive. But it was short-lived. After a strong start, the project quickly foundered and I didn't have the energy to begin again.

I have, at various points, explored other options, but they have usually been wildly impractical or wildly expensive. Now I'm finally accepting it's too late to change things and making a concerted effort to create a dedicated - if tiny - home studio. It's meant putting most of my practice on hold for around six months and having a massive clear out. It's also meant finally letting go of the kind of artist I thought I'd be.

I always longed to make large, bold, gallery work from messy, experimental processes - big canvases, extensive drawings, sprawling sculptures. But circumstances have forced me to use what's to hand: my own body and its gestures, lightweight materials such paper and card, and small objects borrowed from the land and thrift stores. Ultimately it's meant a retreat to digital - the kind of work that can be shaped on a computer in an office setting. 

As an artist, I've often felt I should be uncompromising and purposefully driving my career. But I never forget that there's another meaning of 'career': a verb describing an out-of-control movement that will usually leave you where you least expected to be.

RELAY

RELAY | 2026 | 2m 18s of 16:9 digital video with sound

 

We recently finished editing RELAY, a moving image work and companion piece to Gorse Cone (2022).

Shot at Durlston Country Park in Dorset in 2024, RELAY records me and Megan Calver climbing Round Down to transmit a Morse signal with a large yellow flag. Round Down is the site of a Napoleonic-era signal station, part of a chain along the south coast that used flags, balls and semaphore to communicate with each other. 

With a soundtrack that includes ambient birdsong and wind sound, as well as recordings made on site through a bat detection device, the work reflects on the layers of history that lie over and under the site and discloses signals from the more-than-human that might pass beneath normal human perception.

I'm hopeful of being able to screen it shortly. Watch this space! 

Performers/Directors: Megan Calver & Gabrielle Hoad
Camera: Tim King
Editor: Gabrielle Hoad
Post-Production: Tim King
Original footage shot as part of a Developing Your Creative Practice award from Arts Council England.

Looking back, not forwards

This morning I submitted two videos to be considered for a south-west arts organisation's 15th birthday celebrations. This follows hot on the heels of the AA2A 30th Anniversary Exhibition. Back in 2024 it was 10 years of Hestercombe Gallery and, before that, in 2021, Catalyst, celebrating a decade of collaborations at Exeter University's Environment and Sustainability Institute.

It's good to look back and reflect on past achievements but a little unnerving as organisations fail and there are fewer and fewer future-facing opportunities. The mood seems valedictory - as if the arts are slowly but surely coming to an end.  Or maybe I'm just getting old.

When the lighthouse is dark between flashes

 

Crush | Oil and acrylic on board | 2008

Back in the day, one of my art school lecturers used to say that the first thing students made on the fine art course was a good predictor of the last thing they'd make. At the time, I found this a bit pat. Surely we were there to grow and develop in wild and unexpected ways? But, in my case, he turned out to be right. One of the first things I did at art college was to make a series of drawings in which I used a twig to coax some old and sticky gloss paint to drippily define the contours of crushed plastic cups and tin cans, almost like diagrams of eye movements scanning an image - or a movement tracker following my gestures.

Having spent three years trying all sorts of different things, and being blown off course for months at a time, I got a bit cross one day, went to my studio window and started to track the flight paths of birds across it with a skittering oil bar. That work evolved into What the world becomes, a large-scale drawing installation for my degree show.

It's not that I didn’t change and develop, I did. But I also held true to something that continues to obsess me: how to transcribe fleeting phenomena into stable, tangible objects...revealing the gap between the world and our representations of it. And how to acknowledge the agency of my materials or subjects - as well as my own embodied perception. In addition to being expressed through drawing, it's led me into photography (especially long exposures), film-making (of course), and using data points to make digital drawings and 3-D prints. Étienne-Jules Marey the French scientist, physiologist, and chronophotographer was a major influence, as were the scientific documentations of photographer Berenice Abbott. I also loved this quote from George Kubler in The Shape of Time (1962): “Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes […] It is the void between events.”

Maybe it's a stretch, but I think my recent work about the uneasy relationship between psychics and physics, which addresses the fairly rigid (if useful) ways we construct scientific knowledge, might also relate. There's a lot here to reconsider.