Chaffey College's Evolutionary Ecology Lecture
On Oct. 2 Dr. Juniper Harrower and Dr. Benjamin Wong Blonder held a lecture via Zoom at Chaffey College on Evolutionary Ecology.
By Eduardo Benitez
Dr. Blonder spoke about his experience in getting into the field of biology, his students and work. Dr. Harrower spoke about her experience finding her way into biology and incorporating her artistic nature into her work.
Dr. Blonder, who is currently a professor at University of California Berkeley, had been looking for an artist to work in his lab which is how he met Dr. Harrower.
“I always had a lot of art in my life,” stated Dr. Blonder. His friends were the ones to bring him out of the laboratory and he eventually realized that he didn’t like spending much time there.
Dr. Harrower started off her schooling by going to her local community college, College of the Desert.
“It was just one of those things that happened in my life and it ended up being like extremely important in my education process,” said Dr. Harrower.
She later transferred to UC Berkeley and studied plant biology. Dr. Harrower stated "she was always an artist from childhood."
Dr. Blonder stated that he was always fascinated by the complex patterns of the world.The intricate branching and reconnecting patterns of leaves fascinated him the most. His team and students were able to analyze these patterns in their laboratory and were able to organize them based on how closely related they were to one another.
His work inspired Dr. Harrower’s art based on all the data being collected in Dr. Blonder’s lab. She found the work fascinating and beautiful from an aesthetic point of view. She had previously worked with certain types of mushrooms and wines while she was in Argentina and was getting experimental with her artwork. Using this previous knowledge, she looked at different options to make her art for this project
Dr. Harrower’s artwork consists of two pieces. One is a silk piece and the other part is downscaling old images of a city or town and putting them in microscope slabs so you can see them under a microscope. Her thoughts on her artwork is that she can interpret her art work in many different ways but at the end of the day it depends on the person viewing it.
Dr. Harrower’s artwork is a 42 inch by 12 inch silk piece that is dyed using cochineal dye to show the veins of the leaves. Chaffey College is currently exhibiting Dr. Harrower’s “Botanical Entanglements” artwork at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art.
