About Dennis
As a boy I was much interested in science. I mostly read encyclopedias although my favourite childhood book was Winnie the Pooh and The House as Pooh Corner. In my teenage years I became interested in art and entertained the idea that what I really wanted to be was an artist and I dabbled in oil painting and photography as I pursued various careers in science, computer and communications marketing, financial management.
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In 2000 I had the opportunity to do a Diploma of Fine Art which introduced me more formally to artistic expression in a wider range of media. It was at this time that I discovered printmaking and in particular the use of photopolymer etching plates. I learned I could construct images by laying down a pattern of dots on a piece of transparent architectural film and by controlling the density of those dots I could build interesting images which could then be photographically transferred to a photopolymer etching plate using ultraviolet light.
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This process is immensely satisfying because it gives expression to many of my scientific interests. The process allows for detailed realism which reflects my view that the natural world can be even more “artistic” than what humans can imagine. Creating images by varying the density of dots and small marks illustrates the concept of “emergent properties”, one of the tenets of Big History, which is the idea that sometimes the accumulation and interaction of small elements can exhibit new properties that could not necessarily have been predicted from the individual elements.
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Printmaking also demonstrates one of the mechanisms of biological evolution, a subject of special interest to me. The printing plate is analogous to the genetic code and the intention is that every reproduction from that plate be identical. But in fact random variations are introduced and the result is a set of copies where individuals are more or less fit for the purpose for which they were intended. For prints, some are selected for display and live on, while others are discarded. And so it is for biological reproduction.
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The peak of my work to date has been the production of an art book “Life: Animalia” where many of my artistic and scientific ideas are bought together in a single work. I am currently working on a companion volume called “Life: Plantae & Fungi”. After that, I’m not sure.
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