Jeanette STOK + Michelle VINE
‘Quadrat’

21 June – 27 July 2019
Logan Art Gallery
Wembly Rd & Jacaranda Avenue, Logan Central QLD
OPENING EVENT: Friday 21 June
Live performance drawing by Jeanette Stok at 5:30pm
Official Opening from 6:00pm by Adjunct Associate Professor Marian Drew

QUADRAT is an art-science exhibition by Jeanette STOK, a research scientist and practicing artist, and Michelle VINE, a contemporary artist and self-taught naturalist doing ‘citizen science’ projects. It explores the relationship between a scientific way of seeing the world and the inherently subjective nature of human endeavour. The works in the exhibition demonstrate how art and science can inform each other to create meaning and knowledge. Artists Vine and Stok facilitate meaningful dialogues, often with a playful, deeply engaged awareness of the way in which knowledge is made. By sharing their approach to measuring, quantifying and collecting, they highlight the role of women in science through both a historical and contemporary lens, with a focus on the physical nature of scientific work. It is this very process of knowledge generation that is at the heart of their fascination, mark making and documenting this becoming the means by which they investigate the sites of inquiry.

Jeanette Stok uses scientific laboratories as her primary site of inquiry and has produced a number of drawing/installation works that investigate how the physical actions of scientists are imbedded within the knowledge that is generated. Michelle Vine’s practice is focused on museum collections, scientific discovery especially in the area of insects and botany, and politics of knowledge. One aspect of her ongoing research is the German Naturalist Amalie Dietrich who collected botanical, zoological and ethnographic specimens in regional Queensland in the 1860s.

Detailed Artist statement – Michelle Vine

I am fascinated by the complexity of the minuscule. My artistic practice is focused on museum collections, scientific discovery – especially in the area of insects and botany – and the politics of knowledge. Artworks I produce from this ongoing inquiry can take forms from sculpture and photography to digital poetry and online citizen science; however personally-collected objects and specimens still occupy a central place in my practice.

I am currently working on a long-term research project on German Naturalist Amalie Dietrich, and the botanical, zoological and ethnographic specimens she collected in the 1860s – specimens that remain today in museums worldwide. Fully immersed in this historical narrative, I trained myself as an amateur naturalist; I retraced Dietrich’s journey in North and Central Queensland, collecting plant and insect specimens and human-made objects for the production of both scientific research and artistic works. My process involves doing scientific research myself and I aim to make an active contribution to new knowledge through both the scientific and artistic outcomes of my work. I am interested in how photographic and microscopic imaging techniques could be used to elicit greater human care for protecting biodiversity as we confront the reality of living in the sixth mass extinction event of our own making.