TURNING SCIENCE INTO ART
Creativity with living organisms
Since she was a little girl, Jennifer Willet knew she wanted to be an artist.
But instead of using paint or clay, Willet prefers cells and enzymes these days. Rather than brushes and kilns, she creates with petri dishes and beakers.
A professor with the University of Windsor’s School of Creative Arts, Willet works in a funky lab that fuses art and science together in the emerging field of bio-art. Her lab looks ordinary enough, with the exception of the crystal chandelier hovering over the stainless steel countertop, until the petri dishes come out.
Some of the dishes feature agar (a gelatinous substance used to grow bacteria) in the shape of leaves, trees, flowers and dragonflies.
Other dishes are larger squares housing bacteria growing over elaborate drawings of puppet theatres.
Philip Habashy joined Willet’s incubator lab as a research coordinator in September. Whenever he hears about her latest research pursuit he generally responds with “wow ” and then “how.”
“It is always something different and fun,” Habashy said. “Even the students, every time they come and talk to me about their projects, it’s mind blowing.”
One of Willet’s pieces, The Great Lakes Algae Organ, is currently displayed at the Art Gallery of Windsor.
A crank-style organ plays calliope music while a pump pushes green algae through tubes on the colourful side panel of a circus wagon.
Willet was recently awarded a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Art. It’s a $100,000 annual award for the next five years that she plans to use developing a completely new genre of bio-art performance.
“Maybe bio-art opera,” she suggested.
She would also like to explore the use of bio-art to tell stories about the Great Lakes region or the Windsor-Detroit region as a means to connect with the community and the local ecology. Windsor has one of only two university bio-art labs in Canada. Concordia has the other. Willet did her PhD at Concordia but conducted most of her research at SymbioticA, one of the world’s best known artistic laboratories in Australia.
She joined the staff at the University of Windsor in 2009 and jumped at the chance to custom design a lab in the School of Creative Arts’ new downtown space. “I wanted to be in the art department, not the science department,” she explained. “It’s about the art, it’s the art that is prioritized here.” She gets a cross section of students pursuing majors in art or science with the odd nursing or philosophy student mixed in. “It’s for anyone that’s curious,” she said.