Blog: Impact Fellow, Oriol, leads an art workshop

As teenagers, sometimes even earlier, we are often confronted with a crude distinction: art versus science. The latter is concerned with the real world, with real things and real numbers; the former deals in creativity and fantasy. This is deeply ingrained in us; it can heavily influence our understanding of ourselves, our identity.  

In November of last year I tried to break that binary. A professional artist and myself (I am a physicist and researcher) went to a school and delivered a workshop about the physics of x-ray imaging… through sculpture.  

The school was Haberdashers Crayford Academy, in Dartford. At 9 am, I stood in front of a classroom of roughly 20 students, aged 13 to 17, and told them about x-rays. I explained that x-rays interact differently with different materials, and I told them about the new ways in which my group at UCL uses that information. They were attentive but silent.  

Then, my colleague Lydia Smith, who is a sculptor by trade, took over and the students lit up: she guided them in making small-scale sculptures (5x5x5 cm3) with all sorts of unconventional materials (strawberries, toothpicks, flowers…). They had to consider what they had just learnt about x-ray imaging, because after the workshop I would scan the sculptures at UCL’s x-ray facilities. In the resulting images, the sculptures can be seen from a radically different point of view, with the internal structure of the materials becoming an integral part of the piece.

It was a lively 2-hour event with thoroughly engaged students, enquiring about how their materials would look under the x-rays and letting their instinct lead their creations. Art was in the service of science, and science was in the service of art: learning about x-rays was just as important as using their hands.  

Bridging the perceived gap between art and science is a slow process. But I am hopeful that, with events like this, children and teenagers can be encouraged to see the things that artists and scientists have in common, rather than their differences.  

All photographs were taken by Lydia Smith. See more of her work here.