Hello, my name is Susan Lily Brisco and I am an artist who is excited and passionate about science inspired art and drawing as an art form.  My lines of enquiry are approached with an innate scientific curiosity and the natural world serves as inspiration.  I am particularly interested in unseen worlds and landscapes such as the microscopic and macroscopic.

Drawing is a broad term and my work encompasses a wide umbrella of disciplines including life drawing, botanical drawing, use of the diagram as an art form and even film. To approach this through science, knowledge and research creates artistic responses that excite and stimulate the mind.

I have a Master’s Degree in Fine Art, a BA(Hons) Fine Art and a teaching qualification which also enables me to plan and deliver exciting workshops that foster traditional drawing skills with observation of the real.

I am interested in nurturing those who enjoy art to be curious, to have a wider understanding of traditional and contemporary art which feeds into their own practice.

I am very much attracted to that which is real, which has integrity of subject matter, where observations are made over time or observations made at extreme ends of the visible spectrum. Observing pollen grains under a Scanning Electron Microscope has become one area of interest and art work emerged as an installation of film, drawing and sound to capture an essence of the reproductive cycle of a plant.

Recent scientific research into plant intelligence is a field that has captured my imagination.
Are plants intelligent? Scientists are discovering that uncanny levels of intelligence exist within the plant world that we could never perceive in our everyday lives and it seems the root is the most intelligent, sensitive part of a plant. I am fascinated with plants, especially their anatomies, their root systems and processes. Charles Darwin suggested that root systems worked together like a network of brains and now modern research is confirming this.

My artistic practice embraces this intrigue and aims to communicate scientific, twenty-first century research into plant neurobiology? and bio-acoustics through the eyes of an artist. The discipline of drawing is integral to my work in particular, drawing from observation and this is an area that I intend to develop further through drawings directly from the eye-piece of a microscope, through drawings of plants and flowers through a contemporary form of Linnaeus botanical drawings and through the concept of the diagram. I am attracted to the freshness of watercolour and clarity of inks and graphite to capture essence and narrative of nature.

Viewers of my work encounter a meeting of art and science to generate alternative insights into the sentient world of plants, both seen and unseen. My work highlights incidences of mirroring between plant and human systems linking two forms of life that exist on earth. At this juncture, I hope to provide a platform for debate into our future relationship with nature and plants and to stimulate and inform others through development of art-science drawing workshops.