The Science of Nature and the Nature of Science

by Dr. Jordana Pomeroy

In her Trésor de la Cité des Dames written in 1405, the poet and historiographer, Christine de Pisan, implored her readers “to rest assured...that many great and noteworthy sciences and arts have been discovered through the understanding and subtlety of women.” Radical for the early fifteenth century, the concept that by dint of their sex women are closer to nature, maintained a powerful currency through the nineteenth century. By the Victorian era, the categories of “women” and “nature” were understood as oppositions to those of “men” and “mind.” If women have historically stood on the sidelines with regard to natural history (and not always willingly so), their contributions to discovering what Sue Johnson calls the “hidden structures of the universe” have had a tremendous impact on the development of science as a formal academic discipline. With her “Fragments” from The Alternate Encyclopedia and Hidden Structures of the Universe, Johnson has set about the task of not only using a familiar visual vocabulary to create a new visual world but also of mimicking the process through which a revisionist history is constructed.

In her prologue to the Hidden Structures of the Universe, Johnson lays bare the barriers women have encountered to having their accomplishments sanctioned, recognized, and added to the annals of history. For this project, Johnson posits a nineteenth-century woman author and illustrator whose identity is cloaked in mystery. A possible student of the Swiss-American naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), this fictitious scientific illustrator’s engravings display the influence of work by Anna Atkins (1799-1871), a British collector of seaweed. Atkins produced the first publication on natural history using photographic illustration. Although Atkins’s father was a librarian and keeper at the British Museum of Natural History, Atkins herself lacked a solid background in scientific methodology. Atkins artfully presented photograms of her seaweeds in her publication of 1843 British Algae, but neglected to note the locations where she collected the specimens, thus rendering her investigations useless to the professional scientific community. Unlike Atkins, Johnson’s fictitious illustrator seems to have been educated in scientific methodology as she was “promptly dismissed” from her mentor’s laboratory after presenting her discoveries to him. Without the support of her mentor, she fell into oblivion, as did the bulk of her research. All that remains is a corpus of images that, as her handwritten notes indicate, illustrates her research into the underlying structure of the universe. Rendered moot by the absence of published text, these prints (like Atkins’s mesmerizing cyanotypes) hint at a world revealed that we no longer possess the language to interpret.

This anonymous woman scientist’s fall from grace functions as an underlying theme of Hidden Structures of the Universe. Like Icarus who was cast back down to earth for his hubris in trying to fly to the sun, the creator of Hidden Structures of the Universe was exiled from the laboratory. Her sin lay in her discovery that the mysteries of the universe are encoded in traditional symbols of women’s culture (such as corsets, fans, and furs). Although women have historically functioned as collectors, observers, and illustrators, men have performed the intellectual synthesis, resulting in histories that reveal a masculine bias. Johnson’s assemblage entitled Young Girl’s Bug Collection (circa 1880), a component of The Alternate Encyclopedia, epitomizes this gendered disparity. A grouping of insects on an embroidery hoop, the Young Girl’s Bug Collection, corporealizes the accomplishments of well-bred girls (they will excel in needlework) as well as their past-times (collecting insects). That they should aim to differentiate and categorize the insect species, for example, would take them into a realm generally reserved for boys.

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) was one of the first women to combine successfully the world of embroidery with that of entomology. During her lifetime, Merian received accolades from the scientific community for her research into insect life. Born in Frankfurt, Germany to a family of leading artists and engravers, Merian began her career as a painter of still lifes. Merian’s step father, Jacob Marrel, was a well-established still-life painter who studied under Georg Flegel and Jan Davidzs. De Heem. Her Neues Blumen Buch, a three volume work comprised of hand-painted detailed engravings of garden flowers, provided designs for embroidery patterns and possibly for painting on parchment and fabrics.

From her first major enterprise, Merian easily made the leap to observing silkworms. Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandelun und sonderbare Blumennahrung, published in 1679, explored the life cycle of caterpillars and their sources of nourishment. Unlike the static depictions of insects that were the standard model of her time, the engravings by Merian illustrate the process of metamorphosis from chrysalis to butterfly. Writing about her own garden as the place where she went “to view the flowers and to look for caterpillars,” she related that she “then took very many of them home, together with the leaves, in order to investigate what would come of them.” Johnson’s Alternate Encyclopedia also addresses the process of metamorphosis and the transmutation of life forms. Johnson’s juxtapositions of unrelated materials to create convincing images of newly engineered species such as the Soothsaying Duck-head Crocodile (an invented descendent of Merian’s Surinamese Crocodile) may initially strike the viewer as preposterous. Yet Merian’s descriptions of caterpillars that resembled “Hungarian bears” and of flies with glowing lantern-like heads suggest that she observed these creatures with similar astonishment. In melding natural and cultural objects and presenting them as previously uncatalogued species with uncertain origins, Johnson employs the language of surrealism to simulate Merian’s systematic scientific inquiries into the world of insects.

Because of her innovations in entomological illustration, Merian established an identity for herself as both an artist and a naturalist. Although her reputation as a scientist waned in the nineteenth century, Merian’s identity never disappeared. Women have largely struggled to have their discoveries acknowledged and, only recently, have there been efforts to uncover their identities as scientists and scientific illustrators. The fortuitous find of scattered notes and unpublished plates leading us to the author of Hidden Structures, typifies the process by which women’s work has been recovered and reinstated into history. Beatrix Potter (1866-1942) too, from an early age, studied and assiduously illustrated her observations of nature, but gained recognition only later in life as a writer of children’s books . From 1887 to 1901 Potter conducted intensive examinations of spores, molds, and fungi and produced hundreds of drawings to illustrate her investigations. Because she was considered an “amateur” naturalist, and not a trained scientist (a purview ordinarily reserved for men), Potter’s findings were ignored. Although her paper “On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae” was presented in 1897 before the august body of the Linnean Society, it would not be until 1967 that Potter’s mycological discoveries would be published. Emily Gosse (1806-1857) illustrated her husband’s publication The Aquarium, published in 1854. A study of underwater life, The Aquarium owed its popularity to Gosse’s compelling illustrations that she never signed and for which she received no recognition until recently. Elizabeth Gould (1804-1841) similarly worked for her husband illustrating his seven-volume compendium Birds of Australia. John Gould signed all the plates “J & E. Gould del et lith” [drew and lithographed] ambiguously melding his wife’s identity with his own.

The theme of obscuration of identities underlies Johnson’s different series of prints. An author’s name is missing as is the nomenclature for species of birds, fish, and animals. How can one mistake a bird for another thing and what does one call a mosaic-skinned lizard with a split tail? Certainly scientific artist/illustrators such as Atkins, Merian, and Potter confronted similar questions over the course of their research and presented solutions that were not always believed or well received. In her work Johnson not only pays homage to the visual remnants that that past scientific exploration has produced, but raises questions about the evolutionary and gendered nature of science.