色情网站

Dr. Sandy Talbot exemplifies the relationship between the arts and sciences. One week she might be preparing for a gallery opening to showcase her art, and the next she might be collaborating with a team of scientists to prepare a manuscript for publication on topics ranging from botany to genomics. She  is a member of the CAS Community Advisory Board and an affiliate research faculty in the Alaska Center for Conservation Science (one of two independent research institutes in CAS).

Dr. Talbot is a major donor to CAS. She and her husband, Steve, along with Kevin Sage, another supporter of the College, created the Talbot-Sage Professorship in Art, which supports faculty professional development. Moreover, Dr. Talbot has degrees in both the arts and the sciences. She earned a Ph.D. in Biology from UAF and an MFA in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Her other degrees include a B.S. in Range and Wildlife Management and Master's Degrees in Zoology and in Biotechnology/Bioinformatics, respectively. She also earned a BFA in Sculpture and Drawing from 色情网站.

Dr. Talbot worked professionally as a research geneticist and Director of the Molecular Ecology Laboratory in the U.S. Geological Survey鈥檚 (USGS) Alaska Science Center. Even though she retired from the USGS, she continues to take annual research trips to the Aleutians. She started a nonprofit called the Far Northwestern Institute of Art and Science, which fosters collaborations between scientists and artists in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. 

Dr. Talbot took time out of her busy schedule to talk to us about the connections between the arts and the sciences.

鈥淏oth art and science are creative fields. And I think both of them help us understand reality and broaden our perspective. For example, birds have tetrachromatic vision, and they see the universe in a different way than we do. Each species views the world differently. We're obviously anthropocentric and view the world through a human lens. But science and art work together to provide more context and help us understand the world from different perspectives beyond our limited experience. 

 During the Age of Discovery, the best scientists were typically also artists [or at least took artists on their expeditions] and able to present the world from multiple perspectives. Back then, we didn't have photography or many of the technologies we take for granted today. In order to reproduce and describe to a broad audience what they were studying, scientists needed to develop artistic skills to accompany the knowledge they were accumulating.

 Photography probably [contributed to] the split between art and science 鈥� photography provides the ability to render something that's 鈥渕ore real鈥� compared to drawing, which necessarily abstracts the subject to a greater extent . However, sometimes illustrations are better than photography, because you can't focus on a particular characteristic or eliminate visual noise. But to the extent that there鈥檚 an estrangement between science and art, it was probably exacerbated by photography, among other technological developments.鈥�

Daisy Trails (Detail from Letters from Wilf, a metal book sculpture). Sandra Talbot, 2024.
Archival ink printed on metal sheet distressed using artifacts collected in the Shumagin Island
group. The print incorporates photographic imagery of invasive species (the ox-eye daisy,
Leucanthemum vulgare) and abandoned infrastructure related to cattle ranching on Simeonof
Island in the Shumagin Island group, Alaska, from the late 19th 鈥� late 20 th centuries. 7 x 12
inches.

Can you describe why you see both art and science as fundamentally creative endeavors?

鈥淏oth art and science bring information from the universe and allow us to better understand the world around us. The artist brings more of a personal relationship, and the scientist tries to look at it from a more universal perspective. Scientists are most noted for proposing and testing hypotheses and using deductive reasoning. But scientists obviously observe the world around them and create meaning from what they observe. Scientists come up with an idea, then, technically, they鈥檙e supposed to propose multiple possible explanations. Then they conduct their research and try to falsify their own hypothesis in the attempt to eventually uncover the 鈥渢ruth.鈥�

 But the original observation and the way that [a scientist] selects how you test hypotheses is not standardized; it can be creative and sometimes even artistic. [Like artists,] scientists must determine how to proceed, to learn new information, and if there are no current ways to conduct the work, they must discover a new way. That may involve technological innovation, or the use of innovative statistics or mathematics. There are a lot of 鈥渁ha鈥� moments in science that really have nothing to do with the scientific method. There is actually a lot of art and creativity in the way that scientists engage with the world.鈥�

The emphasis in education these days is often on the so-called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. How do you explain the value of the arts in a society that more often elevates the sciences?

鈥淔or me, in my life, science paid the bills. I will say that about it. It paid the bills much better than art would have, at least for me. But we run a risk if we don't include the humanities and the arts in our curriculum. The arts and humanities give us our ethics, our ethical and moral underpinnings, and they place us within the context of what makes us, us. And when you start taking away the arts you start taking away those moral and ethical considerations that allow us to live a good and just life. We also run the risk of being very one-sided. So, I don't think we should abandon either. The arts and sciences need to be taught together to ensure that we鈥檙e well-rounded citizens. I鈥檇 like to add here that anthropological studies of cave paintings have taught us that one of the earliest practices of our early Homo ancestors was art.  As well, a case can be made that those cave paintings were in a sense an ArtScience practice, since the artists were documenting via art the natural world, whether that was the intent or not.