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Patterns of Connection

About the project

Patterns of Connection is a collaboration between artist Marysa Dowling and neuroscientists Catherine Perrodin and Liam Browne. In our partnership, we have been exploring the contrasts and connections between the artistic and scientific processes and where they meet. 

Marysa Dowling’s photographic practice centres on human behaviour and communication, exploring how we communicate and relate to each other and our environments. Catherine Perrodin is a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist, whose research focuses on understanding how the brain enables us to use the sounds of our voices to communicate with each other. Liam Browne is a neuroscientist interested in how the brain makes sense of the world around us through our skin - examining how behaviour is shaped by pain and touch. 

Over the last 6 months, we have been collaborating with women and their children from the Shpresa Programme, a Newham-based charity that supports and celebrates the contributions of Albanian refugees and migrants to UK society. Together, we have started to explore how we experience the world, and connect with each other and our local environment using sound, vision and touch. To capture the fleeting nature of nonverbal communication, we play with a variety of imaging and sound-monitoring techniques inspired by those used in neuroscience laboratories and brought into our families’ daily environment. Works have been co-created over a series of online and in-person sessions in and around Stratford and Waltham Forest.

Patterns of Connection: #1, 2021

Patterns of Connection: #2, 2021

Patterns of Connection: #3, 2021

Patterns of Connection: #4, 2021

Patterns of Connection: #5, 2021

Patterns of Connection: Process #1, 2021

Patterns of Connection: Process #2, 2021

About the artists

white blonde woman in glasses smiles to camera
Marysa Dowling is a photographic artist concerned with human behaviour; my work has participation at its heart. I build community through shared photographic experiences, encouraging people to explore how they communicate and relate to each other and their environments. I often cultivate the same theme in several countries, building connections across communities, societies and cultures. My work is created through social interaction, particularly non-verbal forms such as hand gestures. Current projects include; The Conversation, working with women in the UK, Ireland and Mexico using photographic portraiture to explore how we interact with familiar environments, and use the hand and gestures to communicate and exchange. Known in Your Bones, is an Arts and Heritage project around Vitamin D with All Change. My interest in the cross over between art and science is central to how my practice has developed.

white women with dark blonde hair and glasses smiles to camera
Catherine Perrodin is a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist, whose research focuses on understanding how the brain enables us to communicate with each other. I work with mice to study how female listeners use the patterns in the ultrasonic courtship songs from males to choose a mate. I also study how the electrical activity of neurons in the brain of the listener carries information about the meaning of these communication sounds. In my previous work, I discovered specialized brain cells that encode information about voices and showed how the brain combines acoustic information from voices with visual information from faces. As such, the key themes of my work are vocal communication, social behaviour, auditory perception, interactions between different senses, and the analysis of neuronal activity patterns. 

white man with short hair and beard smiles to camera
Liam Browne is a neuroscientist investigating how the brain makes sense of the world around us through our skin. My research aims to understand how the brain and behaviour are shaped by touch and pain, and how the separation between touch and pain narrows in chronic pain conditions. My lab also develops new technologies to study behaviour. I undertook postdoctoral training at Manchester and Harvard, and am currently a Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Dale Fellow in the UCL Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research. The key themes of my work are touch, pain, emotion, quantitative analysis of behaviour, and the interaction between different senses.

Join the festival

 

Free, Open daily: 
The Art Pavilion, Mile End Park, E3 4QY
29 April - 8 May, 11:00 - 18:00

NO BOOKING NEEDED. More details on the location and accessibility

WORKSHOP:
Patterns of Connection
Sat 7 May, 14:00 - 16:00

Patterns of Connection is a collaboration between artist Marysa Dowling and neuroscientists Catherine Perrodin and Liam Browne. In our partnership, we have been exploring how we experience the world, and connect with each other using sound, vision and touch.

Join us to playfully capture the fleeting nature of nonverbal communication using glow in the dark photographic techniques, and see if you can match sounds and images.

BOOK HERE

Join the conversation

On Twitter:

@UCLEastEngage
@PatternsConnect
@marysadowling  
@c_perrodin 
@liamebrowne 
@ShpresaPrograme 

 

On Instagram:

@UCLEastEngage
@marysadowling  

 

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