Portrait of an Artist and a Scientist
Featuring Laney Tellegen
The Artist
In collaboration with ecologist and artist Laney Tellegen, this project documents the early stages of a natural ink-making project and its parallels with Tellegen's work with mold studies and scientific communications. This body of work is a visual marriage of Tellegen’s identities of
scientist and artist, celebrating the power of interdisciplinary study. This project aims to encourage more collaboration between the arts and sciences by illustrating an honest and holistic portrait of who Laney Tellegen is: scientist, artist, communicator.
When we think of old masters like Davinci and Brunelleschi, we are thinking of interdisciplinary experts who married art and science together to reach a whole new level of invention, expression, and communication. With time, the arts and sciences have become more distant, and the lines separating the disciplines have become starker. Fine art, as we know it today, struggles to find footholds in the ever-growing world of sciences and technology, but it is people like Laney Tellegen who are pushing back against this delineation by returning to the interdisciplinary practices of the old masters who proudly identified themselves as artist, inventors, architects, and scientists. In Laney Tellegen’s case, her work is bridging the gap between her academic research as an ecologist and her role as a fine artist and creative.
The Scientist
Laney Tellegen is researching slime molds and their maze-solving capabilities. She is fascinated and curious about the problem-solving abilities of mold growth and its ability to find the most direct path through mazes. Her research hopes to find out if the
mold has the capacity to learn over time. Laney has connected her slime mold research and natural ink projects by testing out the creation of an alcohol based ink created from the mold samples in her research.
Laney presented her slime mold research and her natural inks, alongside a series of handmade linocut stamps of ferns, fungi, and flowers, to the larger New Orleans community at Studio in the Woods’ Forestival. Forestival is a festival that celebrates the connection of art and nature and is deeply aligned with Laney’s own interdisciplinary work. This culminating event marked the first round of ink development. It was a fantastic opportunity for her to interact with people from varying artistic and scientific backgrounds and practice her science communication skills. Her presentation was a major success, with her booth flooded with adults, children, and teens for multiple hours straight. Laney was able to provide a space for others to explore the unique interspace of art and science in a way that was authentic and effective.