Home - Diana Scarborough

Art-Science

As an artist with a background in engineering my work highlights our relationship with earth, the cosmos and the nanoscale. Collaborating with Cambridge scientists and leading creatives, I explore concepts and patterns striving to build fresh connections between art and science, creative elements and people to people interaction. My time-based artworks are characterised by beauty, symbolism, metaphor and the experiential. Conceptually and curiosity driven, I seek to visualise the invisible, the inaudible and the hidden from an environmental, science and socially-engaged perspective. Artist Agnes Denes sees her role as: ‘to create an art that is more than decoration, commodity or political tool’ and to create art which ‘elicits and initiates new thinking processes and suggests intelligent alternatives.’ As a current muse, her work and process is a catalyst for my own practice and a rich source of inspiration.

CELESTIAL INCANTATIONS, BIO-NANO INVISIBILITY & POETRY

I am co-founder of the ‘Sounds of Space Project’, an ongoing collaboration with Dr Nigel Meredith, a space weather research scientist at British Antarctic Survey, and Dr Kim Cunio, composer and Head of Music at the Australian National University. As a multidisciplinary creative team we make new meanings, interactions and visualisations of space ‘sounds’ through our art-science events, art films, publications and albums. Our albums ‘Aurora Musicalis’ and ‘Celestial Incantations’ have received global attention, the latter being featured in the Feb edition of the Astronomy & Geophysics journal.

As artist-in-residence at Fruk-Lab, Cambridge, I develop artworks inspired by nanoparticles and biology. Being fascinated by their scale, behaviour and alchemy, I seek ways to visualise and amplify their invisibility, offering up unexpected outcomes.

In a new collaboration with Sheffield-based poet and journalist Carolyn Waudby, we look to take poetry ‘off the page’, exploring ways to transform meaning as an embodied experience. Our film-poem ‘Prologue-Epilogue’ was premiered at a public lecture in the SIA Gallery in December 2021.

101 JOBS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD CAMPAIGN

Diana Scarborough has been filmed by UKRI for their exciting campaign and she is honoured to be recognised for her creative cross-discipline collaborations. Their 101 jobs profiles offer a glimpse into the lives of the varied people who are working across the research and innovation system, some in remote or unusual locations, jobs that they consider essential to the creative, dynamic research and innovation system we need, and they really do change the world.

https://www.ukri.org/our-work/101-jobs-that-change-the-world/video-diana-scarborough/