Everything is Connected: Behind the exhibition

Dylan Brethour talks to the artists and researchers behind art exhibition Everything is Connected to find out more

Everything is Connected celebrates the opening of UCL’s new neuroscience centre, bringing together artists, researchers and communities to create groundbreaking art. But what exactly does ‘everything is connected’ mean, especially in relation to the brain?

While the artworks span the gamut of approaches, materials and ideas, each piece has a remarkable amount in common. Whether it involves asking how we can ‘hear’ Parkinson’s or searching for the colour of memory, the artworks are driven by a strong sense of how art, science and communities can work together to exchange ideas and express the wonder of the human brain.

At its best, art can be empathy in motion, offering new forms of self-expression and inviting the audience to question their own assumptions. The connections highlighted by this exhibition position the brain as a place of exploration, filled with unknowns and challenges, but also intimate and revelatory.

The brain and the solar system

‘The title of the exhibition came out of me trying to combine that sense of what’s inside the body at a microscopic level and then something more about the universe,’ says lead artist Annie Cattrell.

Cattrell worked closely with scientists, collaborating with a wide range of researchers and visiting UCL’s brain bank. Watching thin slices of brain being prepared for slides, Cattrell was struck by the urgency of the work being done. 

‘It seemed like almost everybody I met had a connection with someone who was affected by the kind of conditions that researchers were working towards finding new ways of treating. So it was very intimate but also global.’

Cattrell’s connection between intimacy and the global is a theme which runs through the exhibit. The brain can inhabit so many seemingly contradictory spaces: both individual and universal, psychological and physical, interior while also unknown.

One of the challenges of the work was to find room for those contradictions. Cattrell looked to the building itself for inspiration, drawing attention to an entrance way and an exterior right angle which tracks the sun. Using data from NASA, she replicated the surface of the moon, while also working with gilding to highlight warmth from the sun.

Like the brain, the solar system is distant but also familiar; it goes through phases of change which can be both regular and unpredictable. Cattrell’s work captures that state of flux, expressing the sense of physicality, fluidity, scale, and ingenuity that reappear throughout the exhibit.

Spaces of wonder

Built over the River Fleet, the site of the new neuroscience centre was once a place of healing wells. Water, with its qualities of change, depth and discovery, appears as a constant metaphor through the artworks, from shipping logs to swimming pools.

Artist-in-residence, Freya Gabie, was immediately drawn to water. Researching the site’s history, she discovered that, in the 1700s, Dr John Bevis discovered the wells had health giving properties. In a compelling parallel with Cattrell’s solar system, Bevis was also the first person to attempt to create a celestial star map.

‘It made me think of the old maps where it says, “Terra Incognita”,’ says Gabie, ‘these spaces of wonder that we haven't found yet, which is so pertinent to this research.

‘I was interested in the fact that neurological research could be seen as a form of exploration, in the sense that you have to uncover what is hidden beneath skin and bone.’

Like Gabie’s project, many of the artworks touch on the history of medicine and its impact on how we consider health and disease. They share, as Gabie says, a sense of ‘visualizing the invisible’, uncovering connected histories and experiences to create a sense of wonder.

Every science has its art

These places of wonder are exposed by art and science coming together to draw inspiration from their differences and similarities.

Artist and Associate Professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, Jo Volley, has spent her career working with scientists. She collaborated with academics to compile an archive of colours used by neuroscience researchers.

‘It's always that exchange of ideas,’ says Volley. ‘One is always learning, and that's the beauty of it, you're discovering something new which can make you think about things differently.’

While art and science are often positioned as opposites, the artists and researchers discovered that their differences were an exciting source of creativity. Rather than clashing, they connected through a sense of shared curiosity about how and why our world works.

‘We both have similar goals, even though the subjects seem to be different,’ Volley says. ‘What is that quote? Every science has its art, every art has its science. It's as simple as that.’

Memory is the colour yellow

One of the main questions of this exhibit is how art and science interrogate the nature of memory.

Artist Maria Teresa Ortoleva collaborated with neuroscientist Dr Kirsty Lu, working with underrepresented communities to explore memory. In a series of interviews, Ortoleva and Lu used prompts like ‘what are the colours of memory and forgetting?’

‘Some people would say, “memory is yellow”’, says Ortoleva, ‘and others would use yellow for forgetting, but overall, there's a dominant pattern of memory being colourful, and forgetting being greyer and darker.

‘The idea was to try and see how we can collectively represent memory and what it looks like.’

The artworks examine the different facets of memory, from the forgetting of dementia to how our perceptions change over time. For Ortoleva, this sense of transformation is expressed through lenticular prints, while other artists employ light, sound, imagery and metaphors of water.

The results break down black and white ideas about the brain, illustrating the slipperiness of perception and repositioning memory as a continuum.

Parkinson’s feels like a badly made backpack

This deep dive into the mind was made possible by the contributions of people with lived experience. By working closely with communities, artists and researchers were able to challenge and expand ideas about neurological disorders.

Artist Alison Carlier and neuropsychologist Dr Jennifer Foley wanted to bring attention to the experience of people under the age of 50 with Parkinson’s.

‘We were trying to enhance people's understanding of Parkinson's as a much more complex disease with a big psychological component,’ says Carlier. ‘Quite often, when we were talking to people with Parkinson’s, they would say the psychological symptoms were worse than the physical ones.

‘We particularly asked questions which would elicit a descriptive response. It might be something like, “if your Parkinson's was an object what would it be?” One man described Parkinson's as a badly made backpack, with really badly fitting straps that made you sweaty and you could never take off.’

Collaborations like this one are crucial to the success of Everything is Connected. Lived experiences influence art to create new ways of understanding conditions like Parkinson’s and expand our collective vocabulary about the mind.

A ship’s log for rare dementias

By raising awareness of neurological conditions, the artworks emphasise the importance of relationships, finding new forms of personal connection even in challenging circumstances.

Artist Lucy Steggals and neuroscientists Dr Tatiana A. Giovannucci and Mar Estarellas worked with people with rare dementias and their carers, creating a ‘ship’s log’ of their experiences which was transformed into a card deck.

Dementia is usually seen as a progressive disease but focussing on individuals adds layers of complexity.

‘There’s a distinction between something progressive clinically and lived experience,’ says Giovannucci. ‘The lived experiences that we were hearing about from people weren't linear, it was about adapting, in which you could become many things that you didn't expect.’

The artworks show the unique lives behind diagnoses by creating space for an individual’s own method of communication. Steggals describes working with Ian, who lives with dementia, and his partner Caroline. Ian was able to express emotion by choosing specific weather images from the card deck.

‘They discovered that the logbook activity became a way for her to understand his feelings and was a tool to give her the peace of knowing that he was happy, even though she couldn't see it in the way he reflected emotions anymore, because it's a disease that really affects your personality.

‘But he used to pick the happiest words from the forecast; everything was sunny, everything was calm.’

Many of the projects echo this optimism about our ability to adapt, using art to help people with different needs communicate.

The maze that’s washed away

Opening up the conversation around neurological conditions also means confronting their challenges.

Artist Briony Campbell and neurologist Natalie Ryan worked with carers for people with Familial Alzheimer's Disease (FAD), an inherited condition. Their project integrated the idea of a maze, prompted by an image in a collage making workshop.

‘The idea came very directly from a photo that one person had brought of her standing in a maze as a child on a beach,’ says Campbell. ‘Her dad has since died of FAD, and he had this tradition of drawing mazes on the beach. It just struck us as a perfect analogy of living with this disease, where you are constantly looking for ways through, but everything's changing all the time.

‘The maze being drawn on a beach is inevitably going to be washed away. So whatever progress they make, their person is fading, their character is fading, and their mind is fading. So that heartbreaking inevitability is there no matter how hard they struggle.’

However, Campbell points out that the image of a maze is also playful, offering joy alongside difficulty. Multifaceted expressions like this appear in many of the artworks, from lenticular prints that reflect memory and forgetting to the complicated image of an empty pool.

Art provides ‘breathing room’ as Campbell says, both for scientists and the communities their research will help. Without the pressure to find solutions, art can engage with the messiness of psychology and emotion, finding meaning in profoundly difficult experiences.

Swimming in an empty pool

‘Breathing room’ is one part of the collaborations at the heart of the exhibit. Each of the projects rely on the expertise of researchers, who provided information about a wide range of neurological conditions.

Artist Caroline Wright and researcher Dr Louie Lee worked with people living with neuromuscular disease, drawing on the theme of swimming to illustrate the range of their experiences.

‘Neuromuscular disease has often been an area that exists in a little corner of the wider neurological space,’ says Lee, ‘and I feel that they're often underrepresented. In this project, my initial motivation was to try and find ways of getting creative and leaning on the people like Caroline to find new ways of solving problems.’

Following the needs of participants was key to this kind of creative problem solving. As part of their project, Lee and Wright organised a swim for people with neuromuscular disease.

‘We very quickly realised, even though we've got an amazing pool on board, that for people with neuromuscular conditions, that travelling is exhausting,’ says Wright. ‘So now we're going to meet with our participants and do individual swims at their pool.

‘Wherever they swim, we will go with them and understand the experience that they have. It shifts the focus from us asking them to come and be with us on our terms; it's now going to be done on their terms, which feels much more comfortable.’

Like many of the artists and researchers, Lee and Wright describe how the project helped them understand the experiences of the neuromuscular disease community. They’re optimistic that close collaborations like these will help pave the way to greater awareness and improve treatments options.

The artist in the brain scanner

While the exhibit focusses on neurological conditions, it also shows why questions about the mind are universally relevant.

Clinician scientist Dr Tom Miller and artist Lynn Dennison worked with patients with LG11-limbic encephalitis.

‘They can still remember events,’ says Dennison, ‘but it's almost like we remember historical events when they relay them. So although they know that they were in a certain place at a certain time, they can't recall it in their mind's eye.

‘One of the things that Tom was doing in his research was taking brain scans of his patients. And, in the brain scans, you can see which parts of the brain light up when the patient is recording a memory.’

Dennison volunteered as a control for the project, going into the scanner and undergoing a ‘brain MOT.’

‘I learned that my own memory is quite fallible,’ she says.

Like many of the artists and researchers, Dennison discovered that this self-awareness of her own memory and perception also helped her to understand how the mind works.

‘I learned things about their individual memories, but I also learned that nobody's memory is exactly the same; it doesn't work in the same way, or you don't perceive it in the same way.’

This harkens back to Cattrell’s connection of the micro with the macro, drawing out how individual experiences interact with the whole. Everything is Connected uses art to examine the different ways that universal concerns are overlaid with unique experiences.

The exhibition shows how art, science and communities can find meaning through new forms of communication and expression. The resulting projects share a sense of invention, curiosity and the drive to understand the nuances of the human brain.