Artist in Residence
As artist in residence, Jennifer Crouch explored knowledge creation through making and the role of narrative imagery, instructional illustration and craft practices in communication and understanding.
Jennifer used a range of media (technical drawings, paints, weave, glass casting and ceramics). She often collaborated with scientists to explore the relationship between knowledge and images.
Science and art
Her interest is in the creativity, labour and collaboration that carrying out scientific research and creating art objects have in common. The relationships we form with inanimate objects, tools and machines by virtue of working with them gives her artmaking an anthropological direction.
Be Patient for the World is Broad and Wide
This painting was a response to the use of geometry in Edwin Abbot Abbot's satirical tale 'Flatland'. It features elements of anatomical art fused with drawings of the model Apollo 11 prototype engine which can be seen in the science museum.
The Moss Crest Project
A private commission about meaning, ambiguity and symbolism. It took four years to complete and explores the theme of transformation. The intention was an image that is effective on different scales and deliberately uses traditional and popular symbolism to encourage the viewer to try to decipher intention, interpret the piece and invent their own meaning in the process.
GLASS
Arrangement of glass and plaster - explorations of material interactions
Precession
With CABI researchers, Jennifer developed a pedal-operated dobby floor loom to weave a type of Fourier transform carried k-space used in biomedical imaging research.
The 'Precession' project approaches the creation of a biomedical image by considering the fundamental physical concepts used in biomedical imaging research, the role of powerful mathematical tools and the role that impromptu ingenuity, fixing and making plays in scientific practice. This is alongside the specialised craft-like skills Jennifer saw CABI researchers use daily.
The project begins with imaginings of the proton and results in a woven tapestry representing MRI sequencing and k-space, which happens within what is sometimes described as the 'black box of technology'.
CABI + Data + Weave
A section of a weave draft base studying what a Fourier transfer does to co-ordinates. The beginnings of what part of the tapestry could look like.
Dobby Loom
A photograph of the steel-cast dobby module of Jennifer's loom. The entire loom has a footprint of 2.5 x 2.8m and measures over 3m in height. It makes a sound similar in rhythm to the 9T MRI scanner at CABI.
Arctic
Jennifer's background is in physics and medical illustration. She worked as medical artist at St George's Department of Anatomy from 2011-2013, carrying out drawing in the dissecting room. She has exhibited work internationally, from New York to Iceland.
She was also a member of the 2016 Arctic Circle Residency Autumn Expedition, where she explored indigenous craft and navigation whilst circumnavigating the remote archipelagos of Svalbard.
LAND - close up
Limited edition RISOgraph prints produced to commemorate Jennifer's Arctic expedition.
Situs inversus totalis
During human development, the internal organs of the chest and abdomen develop into an asymmetrical arrangement within a symmetric skeletal and external appearance displaying bilateral symmetry. Individuals with situs inversus have their internal asymmetry of the organs of thoracic and abdominal cavity arranged in a perfect mirror image of the expected (normal) positioning. This condition is extremely rare, and seldom bears any clear relation to medical complications.
