Women Artists and Science

I recommend visiting the Richmond Art Gallery by May 17th to view an exhibition curated by Deborah Koenker (http://richmondartgallery.org/). Two artists, Brenna Maag and Ingrid Koening, have examined the relationships between art and science, but in very different ways.
Observation of Wonder is an installation consisting of two parts. Maag has created a domed structure, Conservatory, which is magical to experience. Standing inside the 9' high dome, viewers can examine over 700 hand-crocheted doilies from the artist's collection. Within the striking patterns of the doilies attached to the interior walls, the viewer can see that this anonymous women's labour consists of beautiful patterns and mathematical complexity. It is commonplace for people to view doilies as anachronistic decor, but looking at so many examples removed from their usual context, reveals their stunning intricacy and the skill involved in making them.
The other part of Observation of Wonder is Taxonomy, in which Maag made a series of cyanotype prints to document the doily patterns. Each doily shows up as white on dark blue and resembles a specimen from nature. The cyanotype process --- which involves placing specimens on chemically treated paper that is light sensitive --- is a form of imaging without a camera that was used in the 1840s by Anna Atkins, a British botanist, for documenting botanical specimens. Maag's invented classification system for the doilies plays on the Latin names in the scientific principles of taxonomy that order plants and animals. The doilies are thus placed in families with double Latin names to denote genus and species. For example, doilies that reference star-like patterns are placed in the family Stellatusaceae (stella means star in Latin).
Maag poetically brings together domestic labour, patterns of nature, mathematics, and scientific ordering.
Ingrid Koenig's Navigating the Uncertainty Principle attempts to chart the complexity of the everyday through drawings and paintings that demonstrate the beauty of abstract concepts, such as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Koenig asks how these underlying laws are at work in our daily lives. Her detailed drawings and paintings are alive with dense mark-making denoting the forces of electromagnetism, molecular processes, and the circulation of air currents. No objects are immune; movement is everywhere and invisible phenomena are given a presence that, rather than remaining on the level of abstract science, is interwoven with subjectivity. Gravitational forces and explosive pressures become metaphors not only for uncertainties over our own sense of place and self, but also over the current crises of the world.
Both women artists use science to inform their work, and though their motivations diverge dramatically, their works nevertheless resonate beautifully together. I'll never look at doilies or supposedly "static" objects the same way again.