BinoSeru

13/01/2022

Eugene Palmer: a Black British artist you need to know about
From the ongoing debacle of the Windrush scandal to the UK government’s dubious race report and the pervasive online abuse endured by Black British footballers – what does it mean to be Black and British today? And what has this to do with our understanding of British history?

No doubt, Black History Month offers some pause for thought. But answers to these perennial questions remain as pressing today as when Black History Month began in Britain in 1987.

British artist Eugene Palmer’s series of eloquent landscape portrait paintings prove an unlikely source for answers. Produced nearly 30 years ago, Palmer’s paintings retain all their original vitality and power. They exude the artist’s search for identity. But more than a personal quest, they offer a compelling examination of British history.

The Brother (1992) Eugene Palmer
Now in his mid-60s, with nearly 40 years of painting behind him, Palmer remains one of Britain’s most important if undervalued artists. Although some of his paintings are held in public collections, like the artist himself, they merit far greater exposure – for Palmer’s painting brings much-needed clarity to the often unspoken racial dynamics that underpin British history and society.

Early years
Born in 1955, in Kingston, Jamaica, Palmer would, like many adults and children of his generation, emigrate to Britain. For 11-year-old Palmer, this meant settling down to a new life in Birmingham.

Following his formative period of art education during the 1970s, Palmer established himself as an important painter. He was selected twice for the prestigious The New Contemporaries, an annual touring exhibition for emerging artists. During the 1980s he was included in important exhibitions such as Caribbean Expressions in Britain and Black Art Plotting the Course.

Lulu Holding Stalks of Wheat (1993). Eugene Palmer
In the early 1990s, Palmer turned certain art and social conventions on their head, embarking on what art historian Eddie Chambers described as “the employment of classically derived aesthetics” which “resulted in a new body of work that was wholly unique amongst Britain’s Black artists”. Palmer challenged a painting tradition primarily constructed around a sense of romanticism, and the mythical notion of true Englishness, with landscape portraits historically used to portray the landowning elite.

Palmer’s more recent work: ‘Didn’t it Rain: New Paintings’, James Hockey Gallery, University for the Creative Arts, 2018 Photo: Steve White.

His subjects were primarily his daughters and younger brother portrayed against luscious landscapes and brooding skies. Paintings such as Lulu Holding Stalks of Wheat (1993) and The Brother (1992) are imbued with a deeply personal dimension. Others such as The Letter (1992), depicts a man in smart 1950s attire, or the curiously titled Duppy Shadow (1993). Originating from African folklore, “duppy” is a term for a ghost, which is commonly used in Jamaica, illustrating how Palmer draws on aspects of his Jamaican heritage.

These paintings of “ordinary” people exude empathy and grace. Elevating their subjects, they afford Black people the sort of respect and dignity often absent in contemporary British society. Equally, Jamaican art historian Petrine Archer-Straw (1956-2012) noted how Palmer’s paintings built on Ingrid Pollard’s hugely important photographic series Pastoral Interludes from 1987, by exploring “the sense of alienation and displacement” Black people feel in Britain “when confronted with the countryside”.

Legacies of slavery
Because Black people historically settled in Britain’s urban areas, the countryside has been seen as mainly a white person space – or somewhere that is “alien” to Black people. Black people have also been made to feel unwelcome in rural areas and this is one of the reasons why Black people tend to frequent the British countryside less – in the UK, people of BAME background make up only 1% of visitors to national parks, for instance.

But Palmer points out that the countryside is in Black people’s ancestry and so it isn’t an alien space at all. Indeed, Black people and rural areas are irrevocably intertwined by the spectre of slavery. Nowhere was this legacy more evident than in Jamaica.

Man in suit and hat stands in the countryside.
The Letter (1992). Eugene Palmer
More significantly for Palmer, such thinking all too conveniently erased the spectre of the plantation from the British consciousness. For these reasons, Palmer’s portraits offer yet another level of meaning. They challenge how the English landscape tradition, like British history itself, remains largely insulated from the spectre of the slave plantation.

One of the most renowned figures of this tradition is John Constable, whose style is typified by The Hay Wain (1821), which depicts a rural scene on the River Stour between the English counties of Suffolk and Essex. Just two years after this, William Clark produced the idealised drawings Ten Views in the Island Antigua: in which are represented the process of sugar making (1823), which portrays Black slaves working in a rural environment.

These two different countrysides may seem a million miles apart, but both genteel depictions harbour a deception. Where Constable’s painting offers a one-dimensional appreciation of the rural English idyll, Clarke’s work shows slavery hidden in plain sight. In truth, Clarke was sent to create these pictures and present what was happening in a positive light: essentially defending slavery and trying to show people back in Britain that it wasn’t too bad.

William Clarke, Digging, or rather Hoeing, the Cane-Holes, from Ten Views in the Island of Antigua: in which are represented the process of sugar making (1823)

John Constable, The Hay Wain (1821) John Constable, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By placing the Black subject within the landscape as Palmer does, he asks us to reconsider our assumptions and perceptions. And Palmer’s paintings reveal the extent to which a certain form of selective cultural amnesia continues to govern our understanding of British history.

13/01/2022

We’ve smelted a billion tonnes of recyclable aluminium. Do we need to make more?
Aluminium is light and versatile, but massively energy-intensive to produce, requiring 10% of Australia’s entire electricity output . Recycling it uses just a fraction of the energy. Why aren’t we closing the loop?

This metal – the most abundant in the Earth’s crust – is used in everything from kitchen utensils to soft drink cans, buildings and plane parts.

Since we discovered how to extract it in the 19th century, around one billion tonnes of aluminium has been smelted. Of that, three quarters is accessible for recycling.

Unfortunately, aluminium’s energy-intensive production has major consequences for climate change. We must power aluminium production with renewables, and find better ways to recycle this most useful metal.

To provoke thought about aluminium and its energy needs, I collaborated with designer Kyoko Hashimoto to produce new works of design using aluminium. These mirrors and vases are currently on display as part of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Sampling the Future exhibition.

As critical designers, we hope to communicate the waste problem created by mixing aluminium into unrecoverable composites, and reframe the perception of the metal’s value, which has diminished since its discovery.

aluminium cans crushed
Trash – or treasure? Valuing aluminium more highly could boost recycling rates. Shutterstock
From precious metal to common disposable
When aluminium was first extracted and purified, it was more expensive than gold. Napoleon III famously had his son’s baby rattle made from aluminium. In 1884, as the most exotic metal of its day, it was used for the pyramid cap on the Washington monument.

Now, aluminium is plentiful and cheap. Australia is the world’s leading producer of the main ore, bauxite, and we export most of it for processing overseas.

Impressively large amounts of energy are needed to break the tight bonds of the metal from its oxides. In Australia, making new aluminium represents 6.5% of our greenhouse gas emissions. The intense chemical process also creates toxic byproducts and pollution.

Over the past few years, aluminium production has shifted to countries such as Iceland, with cheap and sustainable energy from geothermal sources.

Unfortunately, the lion’s share of production takes place in countries such as China, and often relies on Australian coal. Australia also ranks high in CO₂ emissions from alumina refining, an intermediate stage of processing.

Recycling aluminium requires only around 5%of the energy of smelting, the highest recycling energy saving for any major material.

Global aluminium recycling rates range from 34% to 70%. In Australia, recycling rates for aluminium packaging are between 44% to 66%, but likely lower across industrial and consumer products.

Read more: Australian aluminium outgunned by cheap, coal-free global rivals

Why don’t we recycle all our aluminium?
There is scope to boost recycling, but product design and waste streams pose challenges.

For example, the aluminium we used in our designs is newly milled “5083”, a high grade, corrosion-resistant magnesium alloy with traces of manganese and chromium. Such trace metals are used to improve rigidity, corrosion resistance or welding capacity.

While our supplier sends offcuts and scrap for recycling, the mix of different alloys means these are ‘downcycled’ into lower-grade products. Most of Australia’s aluminium scrap is exported, so increasing our local recycling would decrease the emissions from shipping this scrap offshore.

There are losses across industrial and consumer waste streams alike, despite new sorting technologies. Magnetic eddy current technologies can sort metal objects from non-metal objects and even non-ferrous metal objects from each other.

The job gets harder when you encounter multi-material objects. Metal fasteners like screws, rivets and pins, as well as bonded adhesives, are leading causes of impurities in aluminium recycling.

Many aluminium products are designed also as “monstrous hybrid” composites using materials unable to be easily separated. Coffee pods are the most famous example.

These problems have to be fixed at the design stage. Such issues mean aluminium is steadily lost to human use, ending up in landfill and back into the environment.

While aluminium ores are readily found across the world, the metal is curiously absent from biological systems. It has had little role in plant or animal evolution and biologically available aluminium can be toxic. We do not know if this will have long-term consequences in nature.

We drew attention to these hidden issues in the design of our “metalloplastiglomerate” vases. They were made by crumpling and hammering aluminium sheet around organic fibre, plastic and soft metal waste.

In these works, we speculate about what will happen to aluminium as it is ejected from collapsing cities and transforms back into geological rock in the far future.

Metalloplastiglomerate vase, detail by Guy Keulemans and Kyoko Hashimoto. Photo by Traianos Pakioufakis.
Could we pioneer a circular economy with aluminium?
Even as the world fights to stave off dangerous climate change, demand for new aluminium is estimated to double or triple by 2050. If Australia’s aluminium recycling improves, we’re likely to keep making new aluminium to supply increasing international demand.

Australia exports most of its new aluminium, despite our smelters relying on heavy government subsidies. These smelters have been used by politicians to justify power from fossil fuels for their baseload output.

This is a furphy. Hydroelectric power works well with smelters too. Aluminium production using renewable energy may be justified in Australia, if we can manage its other environmental impacts.

Australia should also stop exporting bauxite or alumina to countries with fossil fuel powered smelters.

Read more: Five ways the arts could help solve the plastics crisis

It’s entirely possible to end the need for new aluminium. Since we discovered the metal, we have produced around 1 billion tonnes of it. Around 75% is in current use, and available for recycling as it becomes necessary. Planning to stop producing new aluminium would create an incentive to better care for the metal we have and reduce waste.

And while aluminium is prized as a light and strong material, there are other materials with potential to replace it, including those that capture carbon instead of release it.

Slowing and eventually stopping new aluminium production would demonstrate how the world’s economy can thrive under degrowth – a controlled contraction of production to stem climate change and function within the planet’s ecological limits.

We considered this idea in the design of our aluminium and bauxite mirrors. They contain roughly the amount of aluminium able to be produced from the bauxite rocks that hold them. To communicate a sense of conservation, we modified the rock as little as possible. We made one cut to expose its beautiful pebble-like internal structure, and a second to hold the mirror.

Round Aluminium and Bauxite Mirror by Guy Keulemans and Kyoko Hashimoto. Photo by Traianos Pakioufakis.
In our designs, we hope to show the technological beauty of aluminium production, as well as the care with which we should approach it.

Aluminium’s unique properties drive ever greater production. But a growth at all costs mentality for resource extraction is perilous – especially when we can use what we already have.

13/01/2022

Art illuminates the beauty of science – and could inspire the next generation of scientists young and old
Scientists have often invited the public to see what they see, using everything from engraved woodblocks to electron microscopes to explore the complexity of the scientific enterprise and the beauty of life. Sharing these visions through illustrations, photography and videos has allowed laypeople to explore a range of discoveries, from new bird species to the inner workings of the human cell.

Micrograph of mouse intestinal villi.
A winner of the 2018 BioArt contest, this image shows the intestinal villi of a mouse. Amy Engevik/BioArt, CC BY-NC-ND
As a neuroscience and bioscience researcher, I know that scientists are sometimes pigeonholed as white lab coats obsessed with charts and graphs. What that stereotype misses is their passion for science as a mode of discovery. That’s why scientists frequently turn to awe-inducing visualizations as a way to explain the unexplainable.

The BioArt Scientific Image and Video Competition, administered by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, shares images rarely seen outside the laboratory with the public in order to introduce and educate laypeople about the wonder often associated with biological research. BioArt and similar contests reflect the lengthy history of using imagery to elucidate science.

A historical and intellectual moment
The Renaissance, a period in European history between the 14th and 17th centuries, breathed new life into both science and art. It brought together the fledgling discipline of natural history – a field of inquiry observing animals, plants and fungi in their ordinary environments – with artistic illustration. This allowed for wider study and classification of the natural world.

Peter Paul Ruben's 'Anatomical Studies: a left forearm in two positions and a right forearm'
Art played a role in advancing the natural sciences in the Renaissance period, such as Rubens’ human anatomical studies. Peter Paul Rubens/The Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons
Artists and artistic naturalists were also able to advance approaches to the study of nature by illustrating discoveries of early botanists and anatomists. Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, for example, offered remarkable insight into human anatomy in his famous anatomical drawings.

This art-science formula was further democratized in the 17th and 18th centuries as the printing process became more sophisticated and allowed early ornithologists and anatomists to publish and disseminate their elegant drawings. Initial popular entries included John James Audubon’s “Birds of America” and Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of the Species” – groundbreaking at the time for the clarity of their illustrations.

Publishers soon followed with well-received field guides and encyclopedias detailing observations of what were seen through early microscopes. For example, a Scottish encyclopedia published in 1859, “Chambers’s Encyclopaedia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for the People,” sought to broadly explain the natural world through woodblock illustrations of mammals, microorganisms, birds and reptiles.

These publications responded to the public’s demand for more news and views of the natural world. People formed amateur naturalist societies, hunted for fossils, and enjoyed trips to local zoos or menageries. By the 19th century, natural history museums were being constructed around the world to share scientific knowledge through illustrations, models and real-life examples. Exhibits ranged from taxidermied animals to human organs preserved in liquid.

Wilhelm Roentgen's X-ray photograph of his wife's hand
The first X-ray image was the hand of X-ray discoverer Wilhelm Roentgen’s wife. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen/Brockhaus Multimedial via Wikimedia Commons
What began as hand drawings has morphed over the past 150 years with the help of new technologies. The advent of sophisticated imaging techniques such as X-rays in 1895, electron microscopes in 1931, 3D modeling in the 1960s and magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI in 1973 made it easier for scientists to share what they were seeing in the lab. In fact, Wilhelm Roentgen, a physics professor who first discovered the X-ray, made the first human X-ray image with his wife’s hand.

Today, scientific publications including Nature and The Scientist have taken to sharing their favorites with readers. Visualizations, whether through photography or video, are one more method for scientists to document, test and affirm their research.

Science, art and K-12 education
These science visualizations have found their way into classrooms, as K-12 schools add scientific photographs and videos to lesson plans.

Art museums, for example, have developed science curricula based on art to give students a glimpse of what science looks like. This can help promote scientific literacy, increasing both their understanding of basic scientific principles and their critical thinking skills.

Scientific literacy is especially important now. During a pandemic in which misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines has been rampant, a better understanding of natural phenomena could help students learn how to make informed decisions about disease risk and transmission. Teaching scientific literacy gives students the skills to evaluate the claims of both scientists and public figures, whether they’re about COVID-19, the common cold or climate change.

Hindlimbs from chick embryos.
A winner of the 2020 BioArt contest, this image shows hind limbs from chick embryos. The left limb is normal, while the right is a mutant. The yellow staining indicates the presence of a protein that marks progenitors of bone and cartilage development. Christian Bonatto/BioArt, CC BY-NC-ND
However, science knowledge appears to be stagnating. The 2019 National Assessment of Education Progress measures the science knowledge and scientific inquiry capabilities of U.S. public school students in grades 4, 8 and 12 from a scale of zero to 300. Scores stagnated for all grades from 2009 to 2019, hovering between 150 to 154.

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A survey of K-12 teachers shows that 77% of elementary teachers spend under four hours a week on science. And the 2018 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education found that K-3 students receive an average of only 18 minutes of science instruction per day, compared to 57 minutes in math.

Making science more visual may make learning science at an early age easier. It could also help students both understand scientific models and develop skills like teamwork and how to communicate complex concepts.

Deepening scientific knowledge
The BioArt Scientific Image and Video Competition was established 10 years ago to both give scientists an outlet to share their latest research and allow a wider audience to view bioscience from the researcher’s point of view.

Electron microscope image of HeLa cells infected with Listeria monocytogenes.
A winner of the 2020 BioArt contest, this image shows HeLa cells infected with the common but fatal foodborne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes. Arandeep Dhanda/BioArt, CC BY-NC-ND
What’s unique about the BioArt competition is the diversity of submissions over the past decade. After all, bioscience encompasses the wide range of disciplines within the life sciences. The 2021 BioArt contest winners range from a zebra fish embryo’s developing eye to the shell of a species of 96 million-year-old helochelydrid fossil turtle.

I have served as a judge for the BioArt competition over the past five years. My appreciation for the science behind the images is often exceeded by my enjoyment of their beauty and technical skill. For instance, photography using polarized light, which filters light waves so they oscillate in one direction instead of many directions, allows scientists to reveal what the otherwise hidden insides of samples look like.

Whether today or in the past, science elucidates the foundation of our world, both in miniature and at scale. It’s my hope that visually illuminating scientific processes and concepts can advance scientific literacy and give both students and the general public access to a deeper understanding of the natural world that they need to be informed citizens. That those images and videos are often beautiful is an added benefit.

13/01/2022

13/01/2022