Embers of Life: Data Paintings of the Finnish Arctic

2017

Oil on wood panel

A collaboration with a scientist from San Diego State University, inspired by an art-science residency at the University of Helsinki’s Kilpisjärvi field station in the Finnish Arctic. I created a set of paintings relating to snow and microbiological data along an altitudinal gradient. I made two paintings for each location: a representational landscape painting and a grayscale “data” copy overlaid with color in the snow-covered area. The data paintings were encoded with information about snow characteristics using hue to represent temperature and value to represent density. The presence of bacteria in the snow was represented with colored dots which related to the type and number of microbes. The paintings were designed to be aesthetically pleasing objects on their own, while also being records of the results of the scientific investigation.

A return visit to Kilpisjärvi in the summer yielded only one pair of paintings because the snow melted earlier than usual.

The data painting for this pair contains a sort of abstract pie chart—the microbes were too numerous to be represented with dots.