The Digital Media Center hosted the kickoff lecture for Research Remix, a program that combines the visual arts and academic research to open up a new type of dialogue between the two seemingly different worlds, on Feb. 20.
Jennifer Fairman, a professional illustrator and assistant professor in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at Hopkins School of Medicine, gave a short lecture to begin the evening. Her presentation, titled, “If Art Married Science: An Incredible Romance... and Resulting Offspring,” explained the definition and function of “art as applied to medicine,” a concept that, while extremely important, is often unknown to the Hopkins population.
The Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at Hopkins was founded by Max Brödel, endowed in 1911 and is one of five accredited graduate programs in North America for medical illustration.
The field has an interdisciplinary focus: The study combines art, science, communicating and teaching to produce all sorts of medical images. Fairman defined illustration as “art that teaches,” which coincides with the plethora of images she has produced for various medical textbooks and lectures.
Much of her job takes place in the operating room, sketching various sights that cannot be captured with cameras due to blood and other extraneous materials. Art applied to medicine can cover every kind of depiction, from something surgical to something microscopic.
Fairman went on to cite various facets of her field like anaplastology, which deals with prosthetic rehabilitation for patients who have missing or disfigured parts. She elaborated on the often blurry lines in the land of medical art as well, referencing the La Specola Wax Sculptures in Florence, which are as anatomically educational as they are aesthetically intriguing.
In addition, Fairman pointed to the relatively new concept of graphic medicine, or communicating art and science through comics. Medical photography also produces images that may find similar homes in textbooks and even galleries of their own, a concept evinced by Fairman’s various examples of melanoma, placenta and other subjects of microphotography.
The lecture ended with Fairman deciding to display her own personal favorite facet of the medical art world: metalwork and jewelry. She said she makes medically-inspired adornments, and encouraged the audience to find similar inspiration in the way the worlds of both science and art interact with each other.
The final portion of the evening was devoted to direct interactions between JHU academic researchers and various artists including Hopkins students and faculty as well as those from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and the local Baltimore area. The artists went around the room to each researcher’s project posters to learn the backstory behind the poster’s images.
By the end of the night, every artist had to choose one researcher’s project to re-interpret as an artwork of their own. This selection process served as the first step in what will eventually lead to the Final Exhibition Reception, which is scheduled to be held on May 8.
Until then, the artists will spend the next several months in conversation with the researcher of their choice to infuse new artistic meanings into the sphere of Hopkins academic research.
To view the completed art and research projects, readers can visit the Research Remix’s blog page: researchremix.tumblr.com.
