TLRH | Spinning Yarns: Pathology and Poetry

Recorded May 20, 2020. The Art + Science Reading Group is now a virtual gathering of thinkers, researchers and the incurably curious. Organised by PhD candidates Amelia McConville (School of English and Institute of Neuroscience) and Autumn Brown (School of Education and Science Gallery Dublin) and supported by Science Gallery Dublin and the Trinity Long Room Hub, the series will explore the evolutionary and revolutionary kinship between two approaches to understanding the universe and our place within it. This week we turn from the botanical to the bacterial alongside artist, writer and researcher Anna Dumitriu. Anna’s work explores society’s relationships with infectious diseases, treatments, and the myths that surround them. Especially relevant to our current times, we will pick at the threads of history, microbiology, and textile arts, particularly silk and how this ancient textile material continues to shape medical and technological innovation. Science often suffers from its own modernity and future focus. Its priorities tend towards the horizon, rarely to history and what lessons or solutions may be found there. Anna’s fascination with the infections, outbreaks and the folklore which grows around them underscores the importance of looking to the past, and to the myths. And that the stories we tell about disease may be of deadly consequence. The recommended reading for this session begins on page 202 of Antennae, and explores Anna's work The Plague Dress. https://www.dropbox.com/s/juezmhp7bvoamo5/ANTENNAE%20ISSUE%2048.pdf?dl=0 Alongside Anna Dumitriu's work, is the poetry of Jen Bervin, who wrote a piece to be inscribed on a silk biosensor in her project Silk Poems. This undertaking engages with silk's cultural, scientific and linguistic complexities. You can watch Charlotte Lagarde's short film about this process below. https://vimeo.com/187955041 Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/