On Growth, & Forms of Meaning

Centrespace, Visual Research Centre, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design,

University of Dundee, Scotland, 2011

Public studio for presentation, exchange and production; digital and paper publications

2010 marked 150 years since the birth of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson - the biologist, mathematician and classicist whose landmark book On Growth and Form pioneered the science of bio-mathematics and has had a profound influence on art, architecture, engineering and anthropology among others. Major artists and thinkers from Henry Moore, Le Corbusier and Jackson Pollock to Claude Levi-Strauss, Alan Turing and Stephen Jay Gould have drawn on his work. The book's fascinating diagrams have become icons of visual thinking. On Growth, & Forms of Meaning included a series of discussions that aimed to use D'Arcy's work as the starting point for informal ‘experimental’ natural conversations that explored ideas around visual thinking both orally and visually. The content of these conversations informed the in-situ development of a publication, made by Tracy Mackenna and designer Marco Stout.

A purpose-designed environment established a zone for participants within which to explore ideas around visual thinking both orally and visually, through cross-disciplinary conversations that brought together artists, designers, curators, art historians, philosophers and scientists. Through processes of staging, performing and translating, the combined presentation of artefacts and on-site generation of artwork in an environment for the interrogation and analysis of a subject positioned the artists’ research and practice within a multidisciplinary framework. New work developed through participation, analysis and reflection in the site of display and production.

The conversations took place configured around objects selected by Edwin Janssen from University of Dundee’s D’Arcy Thompson Museum. These objects acted as vehicles that enabled knowledge transfer and exchange, through conversation. Tracy Mackenna and Marco Stout were resident, ‘listening-in’, which allowed a subjective, interpretative response to take place. This consideration of the subjective voice links directly to the foregrounding of subjectivity through personal material in Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen’s 2004 commissioned video work Growth, Form and the Inevitability of Herself in which the growth cycle of a garden is shown in relation to the human process of ageing.

The first conversation, between Wendy Wheeler and Sara Cannizzaro, was about the contribution that D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's work on natural form and growth made to the growing interdiscipline of biosemiotics: a new way of thinking about nature, culture, and art. Developing from research in biology, the biosemiotic insight is that living things, far from being reducible to mechanical cause and effect relations, are made from, and have their being in, information flows consisting of signs and interpretations – and, hence, meanings. This semiotic basis of the growth and development of both natural and cultural life makes it possible to open a conversation about the ways in which we are tied to earth and environment, which shape us, and also about the ways in which cultural and aesthetic life evolves – collectively, individually, and abductively - from earlier emergent forms.

The second conversation was between Murdo Macdonald and Paul Harrison. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was an inspiring visual thinker not just for scientists but also for artists. His enduring influence on Dundee artists can be seen not least, for example, in the work of Will Maclean. In conversation with Paul Harrison, whose recent practice-led PhD research made significant use of Thompson's On Growth and Form, Murdo Macdonald explored the wider Scottish visual thinking tradition of which D'Arcy Thompson's work was such a notable part.

Tracy Mackenna and Marco Stout worked in the public studio during and after the conversations and welcomed visitors to explore their publishing process. The publication was made through visual and verbal dialogue between them, and extended Tracy Mackenna’s practice of ‘performative writing’ – writing generated live in response to a set of subjects within a curated environment. With a focus on interpretation and reinterpretation, the conversants’ conversations were combined with contextualising visual material reflecting the zones of interaction generated by this project - collaborations and conjunctions between experts.

The printed publication On Growth, & Forms of Meaning will be a new addition to the Visual Research Centre’s Centre for Artists’ Books. Produced in the visual publishing studio it will contain hand-written, digital and silk-screened printed pages and can be purchased via t.mackenna@dundee.ac.uk

See

Digital publication On Growth, & Forms of Meaning

T-Notes Visual Thinking