News

2024 Project building Funding Awards Announced 

Our second year of BSI Create, brought new participants and new ways of forming connections. We were able to fund two projects through our Project Building Funding.  

Project 1: Alison Lane (Durham, Psychology), Lady Michaelle St Vincent and Amanda Ellison (Durham, Psychology) met through our first ever round table Seed-mixer event in early 2023. Their project funded early in 2024 will explore the connection between the perception of colour and smell using scratch and sniff questionnaire cards.

Project 2: The second project funded in 2024 was a collaboration between artist Laura Benetton and Steven Cobb (Durham, Chemistry). The partnership will create an art trail to explore colour in nature, through a series of installations with interactive and informative guides. There will also be events for children during the summer holidays to further explore the themes of the exhibition. 

Exhibition at the Botanic Garden, 2025

In Easter 2025 we will host an exciting new Art-Science exhibition at the Botanic Garden which will display a collection of images of biological systems alongside creative responses to them.

The biological images that will be displayed have been collected by Dr Robert Banks during his 50-year career working at the forefront of his field. His research explores the structures that act at the junction between muscle and nerve cells. For more information please visit our online gallery.

Call for creative responses - We invite responses to the images from both creative professionals and the wider community, amateur artists from the general public, Durham University students and school-aged pupils. There will be an temporary exhibition in Summer 2024 where the original images can be viewed in-person. 

Through the relationships between the images and responses the exhibition aims to explore complementary interests and experiences from the different perspectives of the artist and scientist.

2023 Sharing Event

Our 2023 Sharing brought together our quickly growing community of art-science collaborators. The attendees shared their developing work as well as their experiences of working together, revealing new perspectives and approaches. This aimed to create a pool of shared experience and knowledge that will guide future interactions.  

Attendees included the Seed-scheme participants Julie Ward and Paul Chazot (Durham, Biosciences) whose conversations resulted in the publication of the Yorkshire Bylines article “Living Well With Pain”; and Alison Lane (Durham, Psychology) and Lady Michaelle St Vincent who met through our first round table Seed-Mixer in early 2023.

Project Building fund-awardees Andrew Krause (Durham, Mathematical Sciences) and Mark Burden spoke about the different and shared inspiration they had taken from the work of Alan Turing (image of the boxed artwork below). Fellow Project building awardee Helen Schell showed a series of artworks in development as well as sharing the virtual reality environment being developed with Ulrik Beierholm (Durham, Psychology) and Anthony Atkinson (Durham, Psychology). Other participants included Margarita Staykova (Durham, Physics) and Daksha Patel, whose work towards a short video exploring artificial membranes is in its final stages, and Robert Banks (Durham, Biosciences) and Judith Hurst (image below of the artwork shared at the event) who are at the centre of the 2025 Art-Science Exhibition planned for the Botanic Garden.

Find out more about our Funding Schemes

Find out more about the 2025 Art-Science Exhibition

Workshop with Durham Spray Paints

A group of Department of Physics Postdoctoral reserchers and PhD students took part in a workshop (image below). They were introduced to Lewis Hobson from Durham Spray Paints through the Seed scheme and a new mural for Physics is being planned. 

2023 Project Building Funding

Our second year of BSI Create, brought new participants and new ways of forming connections. We were able to fund two projects through our Project Building Fund: 

Project One - Mark Burden and Andrew Krause from Mathematical Sciences received funding to build a collaboration around using the new website VisualPDE.com. This free website gives users interactive simulations of mathematical equations (the image below is taken from a VisualPDE.com simulation “Turing on Turing”). Andrew and Mark plan to use VisualPDE to explore Turing's ideas about biological morphogenesis - a way of describing how the spatial structure of biological organisms are formed during growth. 

Project Two - Helen Schell and Durham Psychology’s Ulrik Beierholm and Anthony Atkinson are working towards creating a VR simulation to explore the visual effects people might experience on the moon. 

Alchemical Dreams

Following a Seed-funded conversation between Dr Maggie Parker and Professor Steven Cobb, early signs of a developing collaboration can be seen in Maggie’s exhibition at Ushaw College (2022). Alchemical Dreams shows the use of different additives to the eco printing process. In the artwork Ephemera, Maggie used copper sulphate as an additive as well as the traditional logwood dyes.  

Alchemical Dreams by Maggie Parker – Ushaw: Historic House, Chapels & Gardens

2022 Sharing

At the end of our first year of our Art-Science collaboration scheme, we brought together the participants to share their experiences. The Sharing was a forum for the creatives and academics to share their thoughts and developing outcomes from funding schemes. Attendees included the creatives Alexandra Carr, Maggie Parker and Helen Schell (image below: The Human Spaceship - A Slice of the Moon; Paper Collage and Paint, Size 1.10m X 1.10m, 2023 by artist, Helen Schell).