Artwork in very good well being: how science and culture mix the very best medication

Anna Dumitriu turns bacteria into artwork. She has stitched strains of MRSA into a quilt she has crocheted with the bacteria Staphylococcus epidermidis, identified on her very own bed. For her newest exhibition, The Romantic Condition – just opened at the Watermans arts centre in Brentford, west London – she has produced a series of small lungs out of felt, dust and tuberculosis samples.

Dumitriu is at the vanguard of a new wave of collaboration amongst artists and scientists. There has, in latest years, been a surge in the number of projects, across all artforms, with a overall health or scientific problem at their heart, and a scientific or health care organisation as a crucial funding source.

Get, for illustration, Mess, the 2012 demonstrate by theatre-maker Caroline Horton, drawing on her own expertise of anorexia or Our Glass Home, a compelling, immersive piece of theatre about domestic abuse, staged in numerous cities all around the country with the financial backing of neighborhood NHS providers.

To see artists and scientists functioning together in this way is nothing at all new. Historically, the two artists and clinicians have been typically polymaths, with their feet firmly in the two camps, and the distinction between science and the arts can be viewed as a contemporary one particular, imposed by an training technique that demands kids to specialise at an early age.

But to see scientific organisations choosing to fund artwork – stating, in result, that it is via art that a particular scientific message can best be communicated to the public – is a relatively recent, and intriguing advancement. So why are these organisations deciding on to fund arts projects? And what do each artists and scientists get from the near operating partnership that must, in theory, outcome.

Arts advisers Meroë Candy and Jenny Paton handle the Wellcome Trust’s arts awards scheme, which allocates up to £1.5m million a yr into “imaginative and experimental arts projects that explore biomedical science”. Candy explains that the trust’s interest in funding the arts springs, in element, from its founder, the Victorian pharmacist and philanthropist Henry Wellcome, who amassed a enormous collection of medication-related objects.

Very good science, undesirable art

But the essential dilemma with funding art to improve public engagement with science – Wellcome’s greatest raison d’etre – is that it can lead to negative art functions that strain as well hard to reflect a scientific subject in order to secure funding, rather than springing from an artist’s real fascination with that topic. Candy and Paton are quite mindful of this. “Wellcome’s agenda,” Paton says, “is about public engagement with science, and discovering new audiences for it. But as arts advisers, our agenda is to fund the most fascinating artists.”

Candy confirms that there was a big enhance in applications for arts awards among 2007, when the scheme was launched, and 2011 (a time period that, interestingly, coincides a lot more or less with the financial downturn, and the enhanced stress on other funding streams). “That has dropped slightly now, and the quality has improved considerably,” she says. “In any round of applications, you see projects that are opportunistic. But generally, people are not the applications that get by means of.”

Artists are not the only ones, however, who can be tempted to flip to scientific topics to safe funding it can also work the other way round. Scientists applying for funding are coming beneath escalating strain to demonstrate that their study will be successfully communicated to the public, especially when it is public money they’re applying for. This, of course, is the place the art steps in, and the outcome isn’t constantly effective.

Artwork as a front line services

Dr John Paul, a microbiologist who has worked with Dumitriu for practically a decade, is conscious of collaborations amongst fellow clinicians and artists that have not proved as fruitful: “I have witnessed individuals scrabbling around to tick the box on the funding form marked public engagement. But that hasn’t been my encounter of operating with Anna. We have learnt a great deal from every single other: she has watched me at operate, and I have witnessed how a a lot more imaginative technique can be beneficial to my very own clinical pondering.”

Anaesthetist Andrew Morley agrees. He 1st worked with composer Michael Zev Gordon and poet Ruth Padel on Music from the Genome, a Wellcome-funded undertaking that investigated the genetic characteristics of choral singers. Their next venture, the Conscious Collaboration, will be carried out in September to mark the publication of a main health care report into “accidental awareness”: the unsettling phenomenon through which sufferers recall the experience of becoming below standard anaesthetic. “These experiences are frequently quite potent and poetic,” Morley says. “A scientific report cannot always quite capture that. Often we need to have the arts to stage in and fill the gap.”

Can artwork perform a wider role in improving overall health and wellbeing? In a speech last September, Arts Council chief Peter Bazalgette quoted Alan Yates, former chief executive of Mersey Care NHS Trust, as saying that “if the arts had not been invented, we would now do so, as a front line NHS services”.

That was certainly the feeling I acquired from Lesley Johnston at NHS Lothian, a single of the funding bodies behind Our Glass Property, an immersive theatre piece exploring the affect of domestic abuse. “Theatre is a really powerful instrument,” she stated. “We’re working in this field day in, day out. [But] seeing anything visual like this gets you at a considerably deeper level.”

This is also element of what drives Anna Dumitriu as an artist: the wish to take her personal fascination with microbiology and other places of science, harness scientific skills, and communicate that expertise to the wider public – together with the history and feelings that underpin it.

Eventually, Dumitriu believes it is something only art can do. “Art, for me, is a way of investigating the planet,” she says. “In that way, I see no true distinction between artwork and science at all.”

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Artwork in very good well being: how science and culture mix the very best medication