Anna White beside her art installation.
5 June 2012
The Monash School of Biomedical Sciences is home to a new art installation by Anna White.
The eleven oil-on-acrylic panels titled Scarlet, Blue, Yellow, Orange, which will be launched on 7 June, were commissioned by the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology to commemorate its 50th anniversary last year.
Anna, an exhibiting artist and Fine Art graduate of the Monash Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, was drawn to the research of structural biologist Dr Michelle Dunstone and her colleagues, and the images and processes generated as part of their work.
“I am interested in how discoveries are represented through staining, colour coding, fluorescence and modelling,” she said.
How then did Anna connect art with biochemistry and molecular biology concepts, and capture the mystery of medical research artistically?
“I was inspired by the idea of protein folding and my paintings are a metaphorical interpretation of conventional diagrams and models,” she said.
“Here I experimented with coloured linear marks that blended, crossed and looped around one another and used gestural lines to evoke a sense of movement.”
On the panels, Anna applied oil paint to perspex, and used a scraper to blend and flatten the paint to produce a ‘pixellated’ image. She chose a transparent acrylic support, referencing slides and petris dishes used in research laboratories, and left some surfaces unpainted to connect the interior and exterior of the building where the art is displayed.
One year after embarking on her project, Anna has selected eleven painted panels -out of a total of thirty-five - which hang in a clustered group in the Building 77 foyer. These panels are connected by colour palette and markings, and can also be viewed individually.
“I hope the university community will engage with the work visually and find connections that generate thought about relationships between art and science, and how scientific discoveries are represented,” Anna said.
