SYNERGY PROJECT
Visualizing the Unseen
Visualizing the Unseen grew out of Synergy II, a multi-year collaboration between the Art League of Rhode Island and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI). The project paired scientists with artists to create a “common language” using art to communicate the science.
My science partner was Noah Germolus, who was a Chemical Oceanographer in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. the resulting paintings explored Noah's research into ocean chemistry and metabolite availability in various zones of the ocean’s water column. Through this collaboration, I learned about his work, and he learned about mine.
“[Stivison’s] paintings seek to understand, on philosophical and aesthetic levels, the human meaning of these discoveries. While Germolus’s work is formulated with measurements and equations, Stivison’s labor comes to fruition with color and form. In a sense, Germolus’s science and Stivison’s art validate each other’s work and strengthen an understanding in a way that even the unqualified support of peers in their respective fields can’t.”
Our partnership included numerous, far-ranging conversations that were rewarding in and of themselves. These conversations offered much more than new and interesting subject matter for my paintings. They opened entirely new windows of understanding about both our fields. Beyond the sheer pleasure in learning about Noah’s work, his methodology, and the highs and lows of his experience in searching for answers, they brought me a surprising new clarity about my own art practice. This was because I was forced to think more deeply about the ideas I took for granted.
As I searched to find the best way to explain my work, something transformative occurred—I developed a more nuanced understanding of my own studio practice. The collaboration helped me see things in news ways, because I was required to look through a different lens. I am happy with the artworks that resulted from our collaboration, the creativity it sparked, and the warm friendship that developed. But perhaps the more important outcome was that it prodded me to deeper thought about how my art is understood, provoked new ideas about perception, and enhanced my ability to communicate abstract thought.
When asked about the experience, Noah stated:
“As an engineering student, some of the most memorable courses in college were my Humanities courses. These were spaces that made me realize the depths to which human thought could be turned to places other than mere figures. Working with Heather was like this, but as it was informed by my own research, Synergy II became was an exercise in moving between abstractions. My work in marine chemistry was quantifying incredibly dilute biomolecules in the open water, which is not an easy thing to describe, let alone represent in an artistic medium. We learned to speak each others' languages though long conversations, as well as exchanges of books and papers we both enjoyed. These conversations made me appreciate visual art from new viewpoints, from the phenomenological to the metacognitive. Just as I imagine Heather learned about the mechanics of the microbial ocean, I learned to look at artistic works and be unafraid to experience them as I would want a viewer to experience the interpretations of my own research which Heather created."
Our collaboration resulted in six large paintings shown below. Originally I planned to create four, five-foot-wide paintings that would visualize the (invisible) data Noah found in four specific collection zones. Eventually, I added two additional three-foot paintings as a way to include “the hand of the scientist” in the project.
One painting called Asking Questions sets the handwritten questions that Noah began wrestling with at the start of the project into layers of transparent water patterns. A second painting, Seeking Answers, immerses a transparent image of him within water patterns. It was a way to show how the research required him to be “at one” with the ocean ecosystems he was studying.
These works have been shown at University of Rhode Island's Providence Gallery, the Falmouth Art Center, the Cape Cod Cultural Center, and the University of Connecticut Avery Point.
The artwork from this project is now the foundation of an entirely new solo exhibition, scheduled to open September 2025 at Pleiades Gallery in New York City.
In another type of Synergy, this upcoming exhibition will include a sound installation featuring two compositions that Germolus has written and performed in response to the artwork and his data. Click on the audio links (paired with the images below at the bottom of the page) to hear his musical responses.
Asking Questions, 36x36 inches, acrylic on canvas.
Wording and drawings copied from the early notes written by Germolus, as be began his project, are written in between layers of semi-transparent paint.
Seeking Answers, 36x36 inches, acrylic on canvas.
A ghosted image of Germolus is glazed within a stylized painting of water.
Oil over Acrylic on Canvas. 48x60 inches. $8,500.
The collection zone represented here is coastal surface water off Cape Cod. It is active water, full of movement, rich with vibrant mixtures of both land-derived molecules and oceanic molecules. It is a "hot mess" of ever-changing mix of molecules, where nutrients are amplified by pollutants, pharmaceuticals, and other human activity.
The image visualizes the numerous interconnected communities of pollutants and coastal life that are invisible to our naked eye.
Click the icon to hear the original composition by scientist Noah Germolus that describes this in music.
Coastal Surface: Communities
Oil over Acrylic on Canvas. 48x60 inches. $8,500.
Ocean Surface: Desert
The collection zone represented here is surface water far out from the coast of Bermuda. This is a place where we rarely find the interrelated communities of activities found in coastal surface water. Molecules get used up, break down, and bleached out in the relentless sunlight, creating a sense of an “ocean desert.”
The painting visualizes this part of the ocean as a desert—using the palette of a desert with imaginary waves whose shape and form were derived microscopic images of bleached bones on a desert.
The lower left corner includes detritus of molecules and forever chemicals.
Click the icon to hear the original composition by scientist Noah Germolus that describes this in music.
Oil over Acrylic on Canvas. 48x60 inches. $8,500.
Deep Chlorophyll Maxim: Cycling
The collection zone represented here is the deep chlorophyll maxim (DCM), also called the subsurface chlorophyll maximum. This collection zone was in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Bermuda, below the surface of water in an area with the maximum concentration of chlorophyll.
The artwork emphasizes the vertical migration, or movement of phytoplankton within the water column, which contributed to the establishment of the DCM due to the diversity of resources required by the phytoplankton.
The amount of activity here suggested a molecular party, and so the molecules are represented as balloons and disco balls.
Click the icon to hear the original composition by scientist Noah Germolus that describes this in music.
Oil over Acrylic on Canvas. 48x60 inches. $8,500.
Deep Ocean: Disintegration
The collection zone represented here is the Upper Mesopelagic in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Bermuda, deep below the surface of water beyond the reach of UV rays of sunlight. There is little or no chemical life activity and microscopic detritus drifts down. Rather than the active churning of the surface water, there is pressure and sideways movement as if driven by a massive conveyor belt.
Click the icon to hear the original composition by scientist Noah Germolus that describes this in music.