Reflecting on art at the Science Museum

What can be learnt from the presence of artworks in a science museum, and what from their particular place in a medicine gallery? These are the questions at the core of working as Curator of Art Collections at the Science Museum and overseeing a series of major commissions for Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries, which opened in Autumn 2019.

These words open an article and ‘In Conversation’ with three of the artists commissioned for the Medicine Galleries, published recently in the Science Museum Group Journal. I post some extracts here to encourage you to read further.

Arriving in 2017, as the third iteration of art curator at the Museum, my remit combined the collection with the commissioning programme. Alongside the development of Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries, we have sought to bring the Museum’s art collections and commissioning into closer conversation. Developed for permanent galleries with an intended lifespan of 25 years, these four new commissions will be part of the Museum’s approach to art for a generation. They are therefore as important in what they bring to the permanent record of art and science in dialogue within the collection – to the understanding of those disciplines’ histories, iconographies and structures – as they are to the narratives and visual experiences of their specific galleries. In the interviews … each artist has reflected on what is special to them about creating work for a medicine gallery and a science museum. In working with them on the commissions, and in asking these questions, as the curator I sought to understand and articulate how these works can make viewers look at and think differently about histories of medicine, but also histories of art. Each work speaks to its gallery, to the Museum’s broader art collections and, crucially, to broader considerations of representation and iconography in how art and medicine engage with each other.

As I joined the Museum during the process of commissioning for Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries, contributing to the development of these works by Crook, Davey, Quinn and Studio Roso has been formative to my thinking about what art should mean for the Science Museum. The question I was perhaps most interested to hear the artists answer was whether they think it is a particular challenge to work with this medical context, and if that is different to working with a scientific context more broadly. Crook answered that it is a ‘responsibility’ to work with medical areas of expertise while also providing a ‘rich ground’, Studio Roso that they did not want to ‘make our audience uncomfortable, but instead spark their curiosity’ and Quinn that ‘my work is about what it means to be human’. These ideas of responsibility, (un)comfort, curiosity and humanity perhaps do mark medicine out as different, connected as it is so strongly to the human body that we each experience. Yet, these ideas also serve to remind us that wider science sits within culture and how we experience it. For me, it is crucial that such artworks contribute to making visible the historical dialogues embedded in what the Museum has collected, as well as how and why. Art helps to prompt discussions about how knowledge and museum objects sit within networks of societal understanding, with society shaping science as much as the creative arts. By unpicking the structures and image systems that give these artworks their richness, I hope that visitors will be empowered to question the structures and prejudices that similarly lie behind the medical word or image.