Gabrielle Hoad uses photography, moving image, sound, text and live actions to create works that are highly responsive to site and context. Addressing the gap between the world and our representations of it, she often draws on scientific data as material. Work may be informed by the process of predictive or descriptive modelling, or may create new visualisations of existing data in order to extract more fluid interpretations.

Collaboration is central to her practice: over the past 10 years she’s worked with scientists, mathematicians, engineers, farmers, historians, foresters, botanists and a glider pilot, as well as the nonhuman inhabitants of a nature reserve.

From 2014-2015 she collaborated with Dr Jonathan Bennie, Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter's Environment and Sustainability Institute (ESI) on a Creative Exchange called 'Foreign Soil'.

The collaboration was a study of microclimates in southwest England, undertaken to assess the feasibility of growing bananas – now or in a future climate scenario. The inquiry, which focused on a particular south-facing pasture, included both digital climate modelling and practical fieldwork. It considered the notion of the scientific model as a simplified representation that facilitates prediction or understanding, and highlighted the inevitable disconnect between speculative microclimate data and specific day-to-day weather data.

By bridging the gap between theoretical and haptic modes of understanding, models can be powerful stimulants to the imagination. 'Foreign Soil' also looked at trial (or model) growing schemes based on research into permaculture and other agricultural practices. This process of envisaging could be said to echo the broader challenges inherent in coping with climate change. As a community, population or even a species, we need to construct mental (and perhaps emotional) models of how the future might look.

The collaboration culminated in an exhibition at the ESI's gallery space in 2015 which mapped and modelled relevant microclimates at a pilot growing site, Easterbrooks, a south-facing pasture at West Town Farm, near Exeter.

As part of 'Catalyst' Gabrielle is showing a selection of pieces from her latest work 'The Luminous Envelope', a photographic series made in response to a collection of 19th century teaching aids held at Oxford University Mathematical Institute.

It relates to her ongoing interest in the notion of the scientific model as a simplified representation that facilitates prediction or understanding. This theme was originally explored during her original collaboration 'Foreign Soil' with Dr Jonathan Bennie in 2014/2015.

'The Luminous Envelope' responds to a similar disconnect, this time between the ‘purity’ of mathematical equations and an attempt to make them tangible through physical model-making in plaster of Paris. In both cases, models (whether made of pixels or plaster) emerge as useful, but imperfect, representations.

As part of 'Catalyst' you can see three pieces from 'The Luminous Envelope', enter the virtual ESI gallery by clicking on the image below.

About 'Catalyst'

Showcasing nearly a decade of arts/science collaborations at the the University of Exeter's Environment and Sustainability Institute, Penryn, Catalyst features new work by twelve artists, all of whome have previously worked with researchers as part of the ESI Creative Exchange.