A New Life: Sylvia Thompson meets an artist who marries her background in science with her passion for creativity.
Catherine Fitzgerald (39) is passionate about both art and science. It's no wonder really because she spent the first half of her adult life working in the field of microbiology in her native New Zealand and the past 10 years or so in Ireland developing her artistic sensibilities - using various media to creatively explore many of the most contemporary and sometimes controversial aspects of science.
"The relationship between science and art has always been there. Old encyclopaedias were filled with myths and legends. In the early Renaissance, there was no differentiation between what was factual and what was myth.
"The scientific revolution heralded the scientific method and the need for evidence before anything was deemed scientific. Yet, I believe it's important to keep your eyes on things that are happening at the fringes because sometimes they make you investigate ideas you have already got," she says.
So, within minutes of meeting, we're deep in discussion about the need for scientists to stand back from their work and see the wider picture - a viewpoint which many scientists fully concurred with last week at the British Association for the Advancement of Science Festival of Science in Dublin.
Fitzgerald's art installations were on exhibition in Trinity College Dublin during the festival and many visitors showed a great interest in such projects as "a different language" (in which images of "special meaning" to staff and students of the Zoology Department, TCD were displayed alongside textual explanations), her large drawings of chick embryos and references to earlier work Unwanted Genes, a delicate DNA-like spiral assembled from weeds, wild flowers, twigs and copper wire.
Fitzgerald is somewhat overwhelmed by the recent level of interest in her work - she did a three-month residency in the Zoology Department at Trinity College Dublin last year which led to last week's show - after spending the previous couple of years wondering if there was any way forward for her work.
"I finished my MA in 2002 and then had two really tough years. I didn't know if I was going to continue. I couldn't even get part-time work until I ended up working in a Visa department of a bank which was not for me at all. Then, I met Paula Murphy, molecular geneticist at the Department of Zoology, showed her my embryo drawings and asked if I could go to some classes in genetics. This led to an exhibition in the Department of Zoology and then to an Arts Council grant for the residency there."
Growing up in a small town in New Zealand, Fitzgerald showed an early interest in science, art and English but with no family encouragement to go to university, she got a job in a laboratory of a canning factory.
"I remember saying, I'll take the job if I can do further study," she explains. So, upon gaining a certificate in science with a specialisation in food science and microbiology, she moved on to a job in a leading agricultural research institute, Ruakura in Hamilton, New Zealand.
"I spent eight years there working in meat microbiology and food safety but with the worldwide trend of commercially driven research, a lot of scientists were moving on and changing careers. In the end, I was working on putting preservatives [ anti-microbial agents] into sausage meat - and I wouldn't touch the stuff now."
So following the trend among many Australians and New Zealanders, Fitzgerald decided to come to Europe for a while. "My mum - who is a second generation New Zealander with Irish ancestry - had filled me with romantic ideas about Ireland and Europe - not that she had ever been here at that stage - so in 1994, I took an overland trip through Asia on old army trucks with a group of Australians and New Zealanders who wanted to drink their way through Asia. It was rather torturous."
However, she arrived intact in London and went to the Irish Embassy (she had an Irish passport because her grandfather was born on a ship en route to New Zealand, giving subsequent family members legal rights to Irish passports) where her desire to look for work in Ireland was immediately questioned because unemployment levels were still relatively high.
Undeterred, she took the boat from Holyhead to Dún Laoghaire. Initially, she worked on a community employment scheme as a teacher's assistant in a boys school and later studied for a BA in Fine Art and then an MA in Fine Art (Virtual Realities) at the National College of Art and Design.
"It was a Jane Eyre type experience, going to art college and living very frugally," she explains. "I struggled for the first two to three years in art college, trying to paint. I was at the bottom of the class but in my last year of college, the Human Genome Project was being completed and I started working with imagery of DNA on apples, apple seeds in Petri dishes and animated genetic codes. I came out with a first [ class honour] in Fine Art."
From then on, her art work became more and more linked to science and the ethical issues surrounding scientific research. "When I was based in the Zoology Department with molecular geneticist Dr Paula Murphy, I was amazed at how little time is given to ethics for science students yet I think it's very important in this genetic and technological age that scientists don't distance themselves too much from living systems they are researching."
And, so there we are, back to where we started - speaking about how important it is for scientists to engage in public debate and, if Catherine Fitzgerald has her way, artists will be participating in such a debate too. "Some art projects fall into the trap of being window dressing for science. And some artists rip off scientific ideas without engaging fully in debate. I'm most interested in art projects which encourage scientists to look at things from different angles."
Meanwhile, this past year has also been one of huge personal change as Fitzgerald moved with her new husband, geologist Martin Lyttle, to live in Co Carlow.
"It has taken me 10 years to get to this point. This last year has been about consolidating. I've been very lucky to move to that part of the country and have become involved in a group of contemporary artists and curated an exhibition by Swiss artist Cornelia Hesse-Honegger [whose work is centred on images of mutated insects found near nuclear power plants] in Carlow Library. Now, I'll have to stand back, take stock and use my intuition to figure out my way forward," says Fitzgerald