Science & Art

Essay by Kelly Desrosiers, published 1988 in the journal Explorations: A Journal of Research and Public Service at the University of Maine.

(Journal cover photo of artwork by Kelly Desrosiers, titled Moosehorn, from her Trophy Series of intaglio prints)

In May of 1986, I graduated from the University of Maine with a degree in Animal&Veterinary Sciences. It seems to startle people that I would, after four years of studying sciences, commit myself to the making of artwork.

These reactions from others have sparked my realization that I have indeed been straddling two camps, two supposedly different ways of being. Scientific activity is thought to be rational, controlled, and concrete. Artistic activity is thought to be intuitive, spontaneous, and subjective. I feel that both of these stereotypes are false and limiting, and that serious creative exploration in both art and science would be similar.

My own motivation to make artwork stems from a need to relate scientific ideas and intuitive ideas. When I combine the two in a visual artistic form, a conflict or ambiguity results. It is an exhilarating experience for me to search out this relationship and to resolve it pictorially. In the process I hope to transcend divisions, and create a picture which allows fact and fantasy to coexist with equal validity.

As an Animal&Veterinary Science student I learned to appreciate the focused scientific study of specific animal functions. In my art, however, I couldn’t limit my view of the animal to a mechanistic one described merely by feed-conversion-ratios and blood-glucose-levels.

I had to consider the animal which existed in the cultural imagination of different peoples, at different times, in different places. What does the animal mean to us? The animal has always been used as imagery in art: symbolically, literally, and ritualistically. The animal is a rich concept, still virtually unexplored. In 1986, I wrote in my notebook the following-

What is the appropriate way to use my interest in animals, physiology, anatomy, ecology in art? The problem has always been the restrictiveness that I feel the Western conception of the animal places on Western traditional art. The emphasis is often on illusion: getting it to look objectively real, three dimensional form, and some undefined sense of animal character. Yet, in Alaska, I saw that Indigenous people had real knowledge of animals that came from deep experiences rather than control-oriented manipulation of the “lesser beasts”. For them, animal imagery did not constitute genre art of a lower status, just as the animals themselves did not have less status in the scheme of things. In contrast, in the Western tradition the human figure and illusion have dominated. Drawings are successful if they look real in a superficial sense, if the skin appears to be modeled over invisible skeleton and muscle. Even if the artist truly knows the anatomy underneath, she shows it through subtle surface appearance. An Indigenous artist, on the other hand, might show the importance of the internal organ systems in diagramming them boldly on the surface of the animal. Indeed what we as artists choose to show reflects what we think is important, whether that is optical reality or a mental concept.

I aspire to express the totality of my thinking, feeling, seeing, and sensing in my art. My latest work has been a series of intaglio prints entitled Moosehorn, Black Rhino, Man-Eater of Tsavo, Bighorn, Caribou, Grizzly Skin, and Bison. I started by reading outdated accounts of big game hunts which gave me a feeling for the quest for the exotic trophy. A trophy requires an extensive and difficult quest toward some control over powerful forces. The result is a material symbol: the trophy. In my making of the prints I tried to hunt the big game of my own fascination with exotic animals, not of the flesh so much as of the mind.

I used the medium of intaglio, a technical and nonspontaneous process whereby I was forced to plan strategies for my exploration of the images. Each image involves an overall acid-bitten pattern, a major symbol for an animal, and a submerged field of marks meant to resemble archaic written language, eroded by time. On some, I took ghost prints that appear faded, and over these I wove stories written in a florid script with a fountain pen and old brown ink. I mixed stories of the moment of triumph over the man-eating tiger with those of the hunter becoming the hunted as the tiger turned to stalk him in the dense brush. A shopping list for a civilized British Safari (including Bromo-powder and lime juice cordial!) contrasts with goblin stories told by cowboys of Sasquatch beasts.

The prints represent different forms of knowledge. They are both visual and verbal. They contain all kinds of communication through marks: imagery, pattern, pictographic marks, alphabetical language, all of which are symbols for other things. They have undefined areas that will remain so. For me, they are trophies of a successful hunt.

My artwork comes from a personal need to sort out ideas in a visual format. Although I do not presume that viewers will have the same response as myself, I can hope that through the elements of art (color, line, form...) the prints will convey a sense of the process I have attempted to describe.

Kelly Desrosiers

Note: in the retyping of this essay I have replaced the word Indian with the word Indigenous, out of respect.