A new art installation at Stanford University features vinyl double exposure photographs displayed on the exterior windows of the Yang and Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building and a series of four interactive sculptures that inspire a playful take on human impact in the ocean.

Mark Baugh-Sasaki, MFA ’17, is a San Francisco-based sculptor and installation artist and the inaugural visiting artist at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He developed the installation in close collaboration with Mehr Kumar, BA, BS ’20, a life sciences researcher in the Oceans Department based in the Goldbogen Lab at Hopkins Marine Station, during a year-long residency, which was jointly sponsored by the school and Stanford’s Office of the Vice President for the Arts.

Baugh-Sasaki, Kumar, and a panel of Stanford artists and scientists came together with community members on Oct. 30 to discuss the artwork and the creative intersections of science and art for sustainability during the 20th anniversary celebration of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Creating our own geology

Kumar saw an opportunity to incorporate art as an additional method of scientific inquiry in the project, not just a way of communicating findings to the public after the fact. Throughout his career and artistic repertoire, Baugh-Sasaki has investigated “how we change the world around us, our role within it, and how we can imagine and work towards a better future.” Brought together by the new visiting artist program, Kumar and Baugh-Sasaki sought to develop an artwork that would explore a question that seemed unanswerable by scientific tools: What does it mean to restore a natural ecosystem like the Southern Ocean to its “pristine” condition (that is, prior to human intervention), especially in a world where future human activity is inevitable?

The installation includes two related art pieces. The first, Double Negatives, represents Kumar and Baugh-Sasaki’s uncommon collaboration. The pair traveled to coastal California locations and captured photographs on the same roll of film to create layered double-exposure images. For Baugh-Sasaki, the piece illuminates how we create our own geology based on our unique perceptions of place.

“Landscape and geology is recorded in both the physical sedimentation of the material [and] also in the human emotion and human history and experience that gets embedded within the land,” he said.

The second piece, Sea of Dust, is composed of four acrylic cylinders filled with seawater and iron filings. Each column, which echoes the shape of a sediment core, is mounted on an aluminum base that viewers can use to invert the tubes. As viewers spin the columns, the powder-like iron will oxidize and rust over the course of the next year, acting as a visual record of human interaction.

‘The poetry is in the correspondence between the two’

Following the unveiling of the art installation, Baugh-Sasaki and Kumar discussed their collaboration in a conversation moderated by Kim Beil, an Stanford art historian and lecturer. They were joined by Hideo Mabuchi, a professor of applied physics who is also a ceramicist and textile artist; and Rob Jackson, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor, professor of Earth system science, and author.

Mabuchi highlighted how science and art can operate at very different scales. As a physicist, his work often leads to broad abstractions about the world that he sees as a pathway to improving his intuition about physical processes. In contrast, his work as a maker is more granular with a focus on “trying to develop a long-term relationship with a natural material.” For Mabuchi, science and art are two different ways of coming to know the world rather than mutually exclusive practices. “Really, the poetry is in the correspondence between the two,” he said.

Jackson commented that Sea of Dust embraces a playfulness and curiosity that ties into both artistic and scientific practice. In contrast to many look-but-do-not-touch art installations, the artwork encourages interaction and prompts questions.

The complex swirling of dark iron filings with seawater when a tube is inverted was particularly striking to Mabuchi. He drew a parallel to the human experience of environmental and climate change where “even very slow things can be really turbulent and chaotic and unpredictable.”

Baugh-Sasaki and Kumar spoke about optimism as a key to effective sustainability action and warned against creating “monuments to doom and gloom.” Kumar shared how the philosophy of restorative justice – which requires one to both acknowledge harm and accept responsibility in cases of wrongdoing – can be a helpful framework for finding the balance between realism and optimism in environmentally focused art and science.

“Hope is a muscle that you have to constantly exercise,” said Jackson, noting how both art and science provide pathways for hope. Jackson’s book Into the Clear Blue Sky, released earlier this year, explores the question of what kinds of narratives and values we need in addition to scientific and technical tools to restore the atmosphere in an era of human-caused climate change.

“Every tenth of a degree matters, every single thing we do matters somewhere and to someone in the world,” said Jackson.