Department of Art professor Carolyn Henne was recently featured in Fields Magazine for her work with white board as canvas.
The pursuits of science and art have a lot in common, as was amply in evidence one day last summer when sculptor Carolyn Henne visited the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. For that afternoon, it became the National High Magnetic Field Museum.
While touring the lab’s unique instruments and facilities, the Florida State University art professor also viewed a kind of “found art” hidden in plain view. On whiteboards depicting the collaborative, creative work of science, Henne saw works of art. Studying them with an artist’s sensibility, she saw echoes of modern masters, including the layering of Nancy Spero, the cryptic markings of Cy Twombly and the symbolism of Elizabeth Murray.
The whiteboard is indeed the scientist’s canvas, a place to collaborate and create, to sketch diagrams, equations and graphs using the Fauvist reds, greens, blues and yellows available in his pack of markers.
It doesn’t matter, said Henne, that she might not know the intent behind those bold scribbles; that’s often the case in abstract expressionism and other modern and contemporary styles of art.
Like many museum masterpieces, observed Henne, the whiteboards display the “mark making” artists use to work through issues and communicate that process to others.
Scientists use other tools to record ideas: lab notebooks, image processing software and, of course, PowerPoint. Still, there is something unique about the scale, physicality and erasability of a whiteboard. It invites collaboration and expands thinking in ways pages and computer screens can’t.
“It’s faster and it’s bigger and it’s easier to be animated,” noted National MagLab physicist William Coniglio, one of the artist-scientists Henne spoke with on her visit.