Artist Lab Report:
Dissolving – a research project
by Julia O. Bianco

There’s value in Science. As humans, we are well-practiced in gathering data and putting it into categories, to make sense of a world we are merely getting to know. Science helped us moving “forward” as a species, creating technology that makes my artist brain spin by only thinking about it. Science is awesome.

What fuels Science, and what I find interesting and generative as a concept, is that of “research”. A short Google search gives me Merriam-Webster’s first definition of this term as: “studious inquiry or examination”. Listening to a lecture revolving on this topic the first week of my time as Artist in Residence at Lakeside made me recalibrate some thoughts and – maybe as expected from an artist – think about this process in my own, poetic, way.

What does this look like for me? I look at something, what’s better, I experience something firsthand. I let it go through me. Then, art may or may not take place.

When art takes place, it becomes part of the process.

I believe the “goal” of this studios inquiry is to gain some knowledge or understanding about something. For me, because it’s what my practice is about, it’s always around the relationship between my self, this person, this body, and the Place I am – wherever that is, whenever that happens.

The only commitment I have to take upon is that of being open and present. It sounds simple, and it requires conscious effort. The more I commit to this task, the more I feel a dissolution of the boundaries we create to make sense of the world. It’s in a way a process moving towards uncertainty rather than conclusions. And for me, it is its own way of knowing and understanding.

Maybe it is just about knowing and understanding things that words fail to address. Maybe it is there where the Science meets the Sacred.

Maybe the goal – is the experience.

Julia O. Bianco – May 2022.

“Artists and scientists are both asking questions about the world, they’re just doing it in different ways”
Alex Braidwood
Director, Iowa Lakeside Lab Artists-in-Residence Program

MEMBER