Rob Kesseler’s work bridges art and science. As well as working with ceramics he also works with photography and digital images. One theme linking his wide-ranging body of work is his overwhelming fascination with plant material and the natural world, particularly microscopic plant and cell structures.
RB: Can you describe your working process from the initial observation of the natural form to the finished artwork? I’m particularly thinking of your work with seeds.
RK: It’s a mixture really. I think the actual seed images that I work with, the original material comes from – for the books anyway – three sources. It’s either from the Millennium Seed Bank, some from Wolfgang Stuppy, who’s the seed morphologist of the MSB on his travels, and also from some on my travels around Europe mainly. I’d say the whole thing is a distillation if you’d like. I would be out looking, photographing the plants, I’ll look at them with little hand lenses in the field, I’ll draw them, I’ll get to know more about them, I’ll try to find out more about the plant, and from that point we start to move to the lab. The process we use predominantly is scanning electron microscopy. The specimen is coated with a micro-fine layer of platinum or gold. You then put it in a vacuum chamber and bombard it with electron particles. The data is collected and translated into images of phenomenal detail and resolution. I do all the microscopy myself. The preparation of the material, if Wolfgang’s collected, he might prepare the little specimen, or I’ll do it. If we’re working together on a project, Wolfgang will be in the micro lab with me, but I do all the work on the microscope, and that’s partly because I’ve developed my own ways of positioning an image, rotating it, getting the best out of its tonal values. There are conventions within the science about orientation, so Wolfgang and I will discuss that. Sometimes we will go with that and sometimes I’ll go with the character of the specimen itself; what feels right in terms of gravity or form. So, we kind of discuss things, but the majority of the decisions are mine en route really.
RB: And those are aesthetic decisions that you’re making?
RK: Yes, I mean it’s both aesthetic and practical, it’s trying to develop the strongest image that I can, because from there it goes to working on the computer. So, having got the image, I’ll take that, and it’s quite conventional what I do with it. I just work through Photoshop. I’ll start off working the tonal values, trying to bring out its three-dimensionality. Then I’ll clean up the background, and that can be very labour intensive if it’s a very hairy specimen; Wolfgang likes to challenge me from time to time with a really hairy specimen! There aren’t really any reliable shortcuts to cleaning up the background, so it’s a lot of manual working with the graphic pen and tablet, cleaning up that background, just isolating the image. Then, when I’m satisfied with the tonal values, I’ll translate it into a duotone to try and introduce some colour and then I’ll transfer it into an RGB file. I start to make lots of different layers and different colours and erase through those. . The colour is based on knowledge of the original plant and what colour it was – flower and leaves – also I’ll use it to distinguish various functional characteristics. Finally I’ll use it from my own sense of intuition and working with the character of that specimen.
Earlier on in my career I did a lot of watercolours and pastel drawings, quite intense in colour and form, and very rich in textural surface; visual texture rather than physical texture. In a way, working back through these different layers in Photoshop you’re erasing back through, it’s a bit like the pastel drawings in reverse in a sense. I’m not changing the physical structure of the specimen – although sometimes I might do that to repair a broken spike or something – but on the whole I’m really just changing the tones in terms of colour and I can model all that, it gives it a character which is different to automatic colour programs that you get within many kind of systems, which they call ‘false colouring’, which will give different colours, but it doesn’t model it in the same way that I’m modelling it. I think that’s why people find them so alluring. I think it’s pretty amazing material anyway. They’re just cells, but I think it’s the quality of the colour modelling which I do on it that really animates them.
RB: They have a different feel than the normal scientific image.
RK: I think what’s interesting is that a lot of the scientists recognise that. I think that in their world that’s recognised less because they have less experience with what the scientific images are and how they are achieved. I think it takes time. In the last two years things seem to have changed quite a lot and I think that is to do with the amount of images coming out generally from various sources.
RB: In the end, what takes priority, the art or the science? Or is it a continual dialogue?
RK: I think there are different points. There’s the selection at the beginning, and that selection is possibly driven by a mixture of the science and the opportunity and where it’s hoping to lead to. As we move through it’s driven by artistic values and trying to make sure the outcome is as strong as possible; I think it kind of shifts as you go through.
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Rob Kesseler is a visual artist and Professor of Arts, Design & Science at Central Saint Martins, London. For the past twenty years he has worked with botanical scientists and molecular biologists around the world to explore the living world at a microscopic level. Using a range of complex microscopy processes he creates multi-frame composite images of plant organs. Using a sophisticated coordination of hand, eye and intuition, they are modified by the addition of many subtle layers of colour to reflect functional and structural characteristics to create intense large format photographs that captivate the eye and extend the traditions of botanical art into a contemporary field.
Collaborators include The Jodrell Laboratory Kew, The John Innes Centre, Norwich, MRC Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Germany. He works from studios in London and Corfu and exhibits and lectures internationally.
Recent projects include an award-winning series of books on Pollen, Seeds and Fruit with Dr. Madeline Harley and Dr. Wolfgang Stuppy of Kew, published by Papadakis, solo exhibitions in North America, Chile, Germany and Greece and a feature for the BBC on seeds and climate change. In 2010 Kesseler was Year of Biodiversity Fellow at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Portugal. He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society and Ambassador for Royal Microscopical Society.
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Scabiosa Cretica - photograph by Rob Kesseler