Mixing Brains - Art meets Science

I was so pleased the other day to find out that a poem I wrote was accepted for publication in a literary magazine. Seeding the Snow, according to its website, has the very neat mission of "offering women the opportunity to express their love for the natural world." I first heard about it when my extremely smart boyfriend purchased a copy for me from the Morton Arboretum's gift shop. A writer himself, he said something like, "Here's one journal I can never get into, since, well, I'm a man. But you should try." I'm very glad my boyfriend is ineligible, I have to say.

My poem is about soil. Imagine that, a soil scientist writing a poem about that. A stretch, right? I had to do loads of research in preparation: two years of grad school and a thesis. At least I can tell you that I'm not so off my rocker that it's a love poem. (Although, that would be a cool idea!) I wrote this poem a while ago when inspiration struck, and when I saw this journal years later I immediately thought of dusting off my old soil poem.

When I was in college I not only took a few courses in soil and environmental science, I also took an elective in something called Aesthetics. I don't think I quite knew what that meant when I signed up -- it was the lesser of some other weird choices for electives -- but it turned out to be centered around the question: "What is art?" This is a far more complex question than you might think, because it is definitely in the eye of the beholder. I know my cat has created a few hairballs that he probably considers masterpieces, or you might see something that wouldn't be much of an improvement at the modern art museum. Anyone who's walked through a museum has thought it before, I'm sure. You turn a corner, come upon a piece that is just a large blue square, and wonder,"Who decided to call that art?"



After a long but interesting semester, my answer to the "What is art?" question turned out to be relatively simple. I started to think about what I felt when I looked at certain paintings, sculptures or photographs. I realized that there were ones that I liked and ones that I didn't like, and I felt more strongly about some than others, but there were also pieces that didn't move me at all. Those were like looking at a blank piece of paper or listening to white noise. I decided that those were the pieces that were not art. To me, art isn't true art unless in communicates something. Be it a complete thought or just a feeling.

In grad school we had a very cool soil science professor visiting on sabbatical who one day surprised us all by giving a presentation on "Art and Soil". You'd think a talk with a title like that would last 5 minutes or less. Actually, he took the full hour, and often snapped through slides fast. As a hobby he'd pored over books of art and done lots of research and found many instances throughout history of people who had used soil in their paintings. You could see kids playing in front of a road cut showing a full soil profile, or of colonial farmers plowing up their land in Virginia. He even had found a modern artist that did very abstract paintings of soil that looked a bit Jackson-Pollock meets my cat's hairballs. So, not really my taste. But through the presentation you could get a sense of how people's attitudes toward soil had changed throughout history.

Why am I going on about this? Well, because there's an opportunity here. I know it's not true that you either live in your left brain or your right. In reality, you need to be very creative to be a good scientist. So it wouldn't surprise me if there were many scientists out there who could use their artistic hobby to communicate with the world, by painting, sculpture, collage, creative writing, or perhaps you're so creative that it hasn't even been thought of yet.