INTERNATIONAL
a conversation with Andrew Carnie
Andrew Carnie is an artist and an
academic. He is currently teaching Fine Arts
at the Winchester School of Art, University
of Southampton, England. He studied chemistry and painting at Warren Wilson College,
North Carolina, and zoology and psychology at Durham University, before obtaining
a degree in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College,
London. He completed his Master’s degree
in the Painting School, at the Royal College
of Art. In 2003 he was the Picker Fellow at
Kingston University. He currently exhibits
with GV Art Gallery in London.
A Change of Heart (2012). YZY Gallery, Toronto. Image courtesy
of the artist and GV Art Gallery.
By Danielle McCloskey
Contributor
Andrew Carnie began implementing science in his art work in the late 90s using ideas, images,
and biological material. Carnie discussed how science became his main focus as an artist:
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“[Hearing Francis Crick talk] was an important event and a marker, way before I started doing art-science work, but I think the notion that there could
be subjects we could look at outside art became important at this stage... I
bought a 5x4 camera to take images of work but increasingly started to photograph biological items on a light box. Then it was due to my selection to participate in the show “Head On” in 2002, and its relative success, that confirmed
my full shift into the art-science arena. Professor Marina Wallace came to the
studio—she was an old friend and really coming to look at the sculpture work I
had been doing. But she found some of the science-art pieces I had been doing, leaned against the wall, and then told me about the project she was undertaking at the Science Museum in London with Ken Arnold, head of the SciArt
program at Wellcome Trust, Caterina Albano, a curator with Marina at Central
St. Martins Art School, and Martin Kemp from Oxford University. I was selected to be in “Head On”, on the basis of the photographs and the knowledge that
I had undertaken some science study earlier. “Head On” was the first in a series
of art exhibitions exploring the relationship between art and science housed in
the new Wellcome Trust Gallery at the Science Museum—this exhibition explored ideas about the brain through visual art.”
SciArt in America December 2013