Life, Matter, Poetry: Blurred Lines and Bilayered Representations of Materials Science

This article charts the development of a collaboration between poet Dr Caitlin Stobie and scientist Dr Paul Beales, resulting from their partnership in the Leeds Creative Labs: Bragg Edition. The authors show their motivations for working together and the philosophical conversations that developed as they discussed artificial life, synthetic matter, and shared terms from the humanities and sciences. Initial plans for the project were challenged and delayed in 2020; the authors discuss how they adapted to digital collaboration and secured follow-on funding for further outputs, mapping new possibilities for public engagement with materials sciences during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, Stobie and Beales consider the layering of biophysical research images with experimental poems which aim to convey complex yet complementary concepts from philosophy, without distorting the underlying scientific data.

Leeds Creative Labs is a collaborative arts program that brings researchers from the University of Leeds together with creative professionals to encourage interdisciplinary play. Participants are paired together based on shared interests and asked to explore their ideas together without a specific brief. Unusually for a funded opportunity, there is no expectation for these collaborations to produce an output.

The edition of the Creative Labs that saw Caitlin and Paul paired together focused on creative partnerships with scientists from the University’s Bragg Center for Materials Research. The Bragg Center combines fundamental and applied research with the aim to discover, design and create new materials. An interesting feature of this collaboration was the combination of visual representations of research from materials science and the oral/aural nature of experimental poetry: a dichotomy that has proven advantageous on multiple fronts.