Presenting the mystery

This month, the Clod Ensemble will explore the relationship between performance and the body in their Anatomy Season; a new film installation by artist Rachel Mayeri will show chimpanzees’ reactions to a video drama alongside the drama itself; and Melanie Wilson will present Autobiographer, a new sound poem performance exploring dementia. All these projects have been supported by the Wellcome Trust through its Arts Awards grants. This year, the charity is celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary as well as 15 years of supporting arts practice.

The Wellcome Trust initially funded the arts through ‘Sciart’, launched in 1996. This scheme ran for 10 years. At times it was run by the Wellcome Trust, and at others, it was managed in collaboration with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the British Council, the Scottish Arts Council, Arts Council of England and NESTA. Over the ten years that this scheme ran, it supported 118 projects with nearly £3m-worth of grants. The Wellcome Trust Arts Awards now has an annual spend of over £1.2m and funds an average of 40 projects every year. In addition to this, a budget is assigned to Wellcome Collection and other direct activities. This financial shift is a recognition of the importance of arts practice within the field of public engagement with science.

The idea of science and art being separate fields is a relatively new idea. In ancient Greece, Pythagoras connected music to maths and astronomy, and in the Renaissance there wasn’t a great divide between these two endeavours. But since science has been defined as a separate activity, somehow sanctified by reason, ‘non-scientists’ in society have reacted to it, sometimes commending and celebrating it, and sometimes reacting against it. Some of the most instrumental ‘non-scientists’ have been artists.

Projects funded by the Wellcome Trust have contributed a small but significant part of this history in recent years. The organisation is interested in projects that investigate the science behind human and animal health, in both contemporary and historical contexts. It is important that the creative process of funded projects is informed by an ‘expert’ perspective. This sometimes manifests itself in direct collaboration or sometimes the scientist or historian takes an advisory role. Sometimes the artistic practice communicates ideas behind the science, and sometimes it reacts against this, stimulating discussion and debate.

Over the past 15 years, the nature of collaborations between scientists and artists hasn’t shifted dramatically. It would be tempting to think that these collaborations may be easier now due to foundations that have been laid but this isn’t the case at all. Like any collaboration, they depend on time, willingness, sensitivity, resilience, respect, expertise and many other unquantifiable traits. The most exciting collaborations leave lots of questions unanswered: they don’t demystify science at all. Frequently they present the mystery. They allow people to start asking questions for themselves.

While the nature of collaboration remains constant, the landscape for this work is changing. The field of science communication grew out of a late twentieth-century concern from scientists and policy-makers that the public lacked an understanding of science and therefore feared it. This field has developed over the last 20 years, with several Master’s programmes devoted to the subject being set up in the UK and the rest of the world. This discipline has evolved to develop two-way engagement to stimulate discussion and debate. More than ever, a conscious effort is being made to bring science to the forefront of people’s daily agendas. The ‘Brian Cox effect’ is just one small part of a mass effort to engage publics with science and make it an integral part of all our lives.

These days science sells out. The ‘Uncaged Monkeys’ filled the Hammersmith Apollo with stories from self-confessed geeks, the Times has a monthly colour supplement devoted solely to science, and every week in the Observer, science is discussed alongside the arts in The New Review. It has become intellectual entertainment with defined audiences, editors, producers and curators, just like our great arts projects.

But what does this mean for arts practice in this context? One of the drivers for organisations like the Wellcome Trust funding arts projects is for science to reach new audiences. When science is becoming so integral to our mainstream, does the idea of a medical charity funding arts projects become redundant? The answer, of course, is no. These collaborations should be braver and more confident than ever before. Science being at the front of the public agenda opens up a greater need for artists to interrogate and investigate it.

Informative evaluations have been undertaken that we can draw on and new work is happening all the time. Trainee doctors at Brighton and Sussex Medical School can now undertake arts courses as part of their curriculum. This shows the value attached to the arts in some scientific institutions. Central Saint Martins have just started a new Master’s programme devoted to understanding the relationship between these two fields, illustrating the respect that an arts institution has gained for science.

Each project is a new adventure depending on the expertise of all the people involved. Different methodologies are being tried and tested, and different schools of practice are developing with their own leaders and mentors. But there still isn’t any magic formula for success. The most exciting thing remains to challenge people to knock on doors and have conversations that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. However mainstream science becomes, there will still be closed doors and someone will need to open them. The Wellcome Trust aims to give people the confidence to carry on opening new doors and having new conversations for the next 75 years.