SciArt profile: Kathryn Garner

In this SciArt profile, we meet Kathryn Garner, whose passion for art and science has been linked throughout her life as she discovered her passion for science through her art.

Can you tell us about your background and what you work on now?

I discovered a fascination with intracellular signalling pathways early on in my BSc (Hons) Molecular Cell Biology studies at University College London (UCL), UK, which led to a PhD investigating some novel lipid transfer proteins in the heart. After UCL, I held several postdoctoral positions at the University of Bristol, first working on signalling pathways in the cardiovascular system, then, learning to use High Content Imaging (HCI) to study Gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) signalling dynamics before settling on the kidney. I was awarded a Kidney Research UK Intermediate Fellowship in 2017 to study signalling at the interface between inflammation and blood pressure regulation. HCI generates a huge amount of data, and during my research on GnRH, I worked with mathematicians and statisticians to develop mathematical models. I was able to apply some of this understanding to my fellowship research.

I began working as a Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University, UK, as the first lockdown engulfed us in 2020. I lasted a full academic year of teaching online and homeschooling before being headhunted to join Newcells Biotech as Head of Kidney Development in 2021. I led a Research & Development team developing primary kidney models for testing new drug molecules for pharmaceutical companies. I discovered that I am particularly good at establishing relationships with new clients, making connections, and helping to develop programmes of work to suit their needs. For the last year, I have been working as a consultant contributing to a wide range of projects with different types of companies, from providing advice on developing kidney models to a pharmaceutical company to helping to place cardiac organoid technology in the market for a biotech company, as well as helping a management consultancy navigate microphysiological systems (MPS), including organ-on-a-chip. I recently partnered with a software company to help my clients find custom IT solutions for connecting lab equipment, automate data analysis, or analyse tricky images – which I’m really excited about.

Were you always going to be a scientist?

No, quite the opposite! The art room was where I felt I belonged at school. I was good at art and my dad is an artist. But there were a couple of things that happened early in secondary school that made me wonder whether art was everything for me. In year 10, we learnt about cell biology for the first time, and I found it came so naturally to me, like it was something I had always known. I was the only one in the class to get full marks on the cell biology test. A few months later, we were dissecting a frog, and while my lab partner had long lost interest and was off talking to a boy, I remember being captivated by the frog’s insides and wondering about the connection between what we think and the physical matter of the body. I decided then and there that I wanted to study Neuroscience and I switched my A-level choices from art to four sciences. Only, somewhere along the way, I changed my mind, and no one seemed surprised when I asked to change back to Art & Design. After finishing school, I took an Art Foundation course in High Wycombe, UK, and then moved to Cornwall, UK, to study BA(Hons) Fine Art at Falmouth College of Arts.

Unlike at school, the curriculum at Falmouth was completely unstructured – we were given a studio space and a tutor to check in with, but other than that it was important we searched out our own inspiration to find our voice. While the other students were making etchings from drawings of shells on the beach, or painting stormy oil paintings, my curiosity took me to the biology textbooks in the library. In my first year, I made a collection of Cell Paintings inspired by brightly-coloured histology images, including Purple Cell Drawing (1999) and Orange Cell Drawing (1999). These works were fresh and vibrant but something niggled at me. It felt like I was copying – I wanted to know more. I wanted to understand the images that I was copying, and I wanted to be able to put more of myself into them. In my final year show, I displayed portraits that were complex, close-up and abstracted – teetering on the edge between what is known and what is unknown. A couple of years later, I exhibited a collection of oil paintings including Ear (2004) in a group show in a gallery in Hammersmith, UK. At this time, I was working as a Cryobank Scientist at an infertility clinic, finally studying those science A-levels in evening classes. The following year, I enrolled at UCL.

And what about art – have you always enjoyed it?

All of my earliest memories included art, whether it was sitting for one of my dad’s paintings in his studio or hiding in our loft with a big piece of paper drawing an imagined village with roads and buildings. Going to galleries still fills me with that sense of wide-eyed childlike wonder that I had– what treasures would be waiting for me around the next corner? Would I find something new from an artist I’d not heard of before or an old love I’d forgotten about? On a Saturday, we might have reason to drive up to London to submit one of my dad’s paintings for an exhibition, and afterwards visit the Tate or the Royal Academy or the National Gallery.

What or who are your most important artistic influences?

I love to be enveloped by art, and Terry Winters, Roberto Matta, and Sarah Sze, are artists whose work I come back to repeatedly. All three create other worlds in their art, works that you can spend ages looking at with your mind getting lost in them. Terry Winters seems to layer up graphs and other visualisations of data to create large complex paintings. In 1999, I travelled around the United States by myself on Greyhound buses, stopping in at the art galleries in the big cities. In the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I first saw ‘Invasion of the Night’ by Roberto Matta and was compelled to be absorbed by it – a safe refuge from all that was outside and unfamiliar. In the giftshop, I came across a little book of Sarah Sze’s installations, eventually able to see some in person in London several years later. Sze creates elegant miniature worlds from everyday objects – cotton buds, tape measures, pencils – and spending time with them you find yourself wishing you could shrink down to climb the tiny matchstick ladders.

How do you make your art?

As I came to the end of my PhD, I started to think about art again and how I could join everything up. I was now thinking about cells as tiny cities with highways, or as houses with compartments tailored to different functions – like in a home the bedroom is for sleeping in, the kitchen for preparing food, and so on. I made Compartmentalisation (2012) combining different types of images that had a similar level of complexity as the histology images I copied at art school, only this time with meaning. Here are compartments from a settlement of the Dogon people, who live in the central plateau region of Mali, next to plans of villages in Chad and Cameroon. At the bottom is a drawing of a circuit board, with its connected elements and flows of information. Over the years, I have tried lots of different ways of putting images together. In Emergent Properties (2022-23), I layered up the emergency evacuation plan of Cramlington Children’s Hospital in Northumberland, a children’s playground, and a circuit board, and then added the layer of green to help edit parts out to create something new. In Kidney slice + water treatment plant (2025), I returned to a histology image as a starting point and added an aerial view of a water treatment plant. The circular sediment tanks ground the abstract nature of the kidney slice and directly talk about the function of the kidney in the body.

Does your background in science influence your art?

Art and science have tended to come together for me through public engagement activities, such as running a ‘Brain Art’ competition for local school children at Bristol Neuroscience Festival. A selection of work was presented in the Wills Memorial Building at the top of Park Street in Bristol, which is very grand, before being displayed at the Royal West of England Academy (RWA). This event was fantastic in encouraging children who are usually more interested in art to think about science for a change. It was an opportunity I think I would have loved as a child.

Sometimes, it was the process of carrying out scientific research that I found interesting from an artistic point of view, rather than the subject of the work itself. Groynes and Keys was a piece I made that directly came from my activities in the lab. I was doing a lot of cell culture at the time, and I found a good way to introduce regular drawing into my day was to draw a flask of cells under the microscope while another was being incubated with trypsin for 5 mins. This piece is an amalgamation of several drawings of HEK-293 cells and was exhibited at a SciArt exhibition at Royal United Hospital, Bath (2016-17), organised by the Bristol and Bath branch of the British Science Association. I named this piece, Groynes and Keys, because whenever I’m drawing pictures of cells, I find it difficult not to think of maps of waterways and inlets.

What are you thinking of working on next?

All of my original Cell Paintings have new homes – Purple Cell Drawing can be found in a seminar room in the Learning and Research Building of Southmead Hospital, Bristol, and Compartmentalisation hangs in the foyer of the Dorothy Hodgkin Building at the University of Bristol. I am currently growing a new body of work, and I am keen to see more of it in universities, institutions and life science companies, potentially through commissions or other opportunities. I love being sent microscopy images to look at so I would be keen to work closely with scientists to make new paintings.

Find out more about Kathryn:

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