Patterns of Connection 2022

UCL Trellis 3, Public Art Project 2021-22

Patterns of Connection was a collaboration between artist Marysa Dowling and neuroscientists Catherine Perrodin and Liam Browne. In our partnership, we explored the contrasts and connections between the artistic and scientific processes and where the two disciplines 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 six months, we collaborated 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 explored how we experience the world and connected with each other as well as our local environment using sound, vision and touch. To capture the fleeting nature of nonverbal communication, we played with a variety of imaging and sound-monitoring techniques, inspired by those used in neuroscience laboratories. We brought these techniques into the daily environments of the participating families. Artworks were co-created over a series of online and in-person sessions in and around Stratford and Waltham Forest.