Anabaptist World: How did you become an artist? When did your chemistry background and training begin to express itself in visual art?
Ruth Maust: I’ve always been an art lover, but I’ve only recently started getting comfortable with calling myself an artist! In the past few years I’ve been making an effort to make art and share my art on a more regular basis.
Although I do consider chemistry research to be a kind of creative work, I’ve also realized I need a different outlet to process and express my feelings and experiences as a scientist and a person. Making the piece “DESPITE THE VIOLENCE AROUND THE BLACK HOLE, THE GALACTIC CORE IS A FERTILE PLACE.” was a critical point for integrating scientific motifs and themes in my artwork. Only after the piece came together was I able to recognize what I was contending with at that time: the excitement of gaining a little more understanding about how the world works, the struggle of trying to answer questions on the edge of human knowledge and the realization that there is vastly more that I/we don’t know than what I/we do. This piece was the conception of a body of work related to scientific discovery and the relationship between science and society.
AW: You work in mixed media. Your earlier work tends to be in collage, but your recent work is more conceptual, especially “Ideabook triptych” and “Excerpts from Notebook #1 to Notebook #6.” Could you say more about what led you in that direction?
RM: Those particular pieces were both motivated by external prompts. I made “Excerpts from Notebook #1 to Notebook #6” as an entry for an exhibition called Research as Art, where other entries ranged from photos of people’s experiments to microscopy images to data visualizations. Sketching out concepts like the steps in a chemical reaction was such a big part of my research process, and I wanted to capture the repetition of chemical structures and the visual development of ideas in my notes by compiling numerous pages in one larger image.
“Ideabook triptych” was inspired by a Covid-era assignment created by a professor of advertising who was one of my graduate school mentors. For the assignment, advertising students were instructed to compile an “ideabook” with one page for each of the given prompts. I took a few of the prompts that spoke to me and made my own version of “ideabook” pages. I digitally edited my pen drawings to make the final piece.
AW: As I spend time with your portfolio, it is clear to me that color and pattern are important both to your artwork and your study of molecules. I see this especially in “Phenylene.” Could you describe your process in creating “Phenylene”?
RM: I made “Phenylene” near the end of graduate school, when I had pages and pages of draft documents from various stages of my graduate research to sort through and get rid of. One stack of pages was a draft of a scientific poster I had made for a conference, and I had mistakenly printed it out full-size over maybe 20 pieces of paper, which I had saved. I cut each of these pages into horizontal or vertical strips and wove them together. I then arranged the woven sheets in different combinations until I landed on this hexagonal layout. The small hexagonal cutouts were from my leftover business cards. The rest of the process was figuring out how to attach everything in a symmetrical way! Both the hexagonal shapes and the blue, green and teal colors evoke aspects of my research, but in an abstracted way.
AW: When I see the hexagonal shapes in “Phenylene,” I can’t help but think of English paper-pieced quilts that also use hexagonal shapes. Color and pattern are important to quilting, as well. Is there any connection or influence from quilting in your work?
RM: That’s so interesting! I love hearing what other people see in my art – it gives me a fresh perspective. I wasn’t intentionally thinking of quilts when I made the piece, but I can see the resemblance. My paternal grandmother was a quilter (and seamstress and crafter), so maybe there’s some subconscious influence in my work just from being exposed to that art form.
AW: Could you describe your artistic process? Does your artistic process bear any resemblance to a process you might use in a chemistry lab?
RM: I would describe my artistic process as materials-inspired and experimental. Once in a while I will have an idea ahead of time and then figure out how to make it come to fruition. But typically I start with a loose idea based on what materials I have on hand and what combination of materials or techniques strikes my interest at the time.
I do think about the materials I use from a chemistry perspective. There’s a parallel that can be drawn between art and chemistry: that by working hands-on with materials, over time you develop intuition for how they will react or respond. What I like about creating art, though, is that I can let go of the idea that there’s a right answer or right way to use materials, so for me it’s much more playful than working in a lab. Art materials also typically come with fewer safety concerns!
AW: Your earlier work focused on collage with paper, but I notice in your Kaleidoscope series, you’re working in digital collage. How do you create works such as “Black hole 2” and others?
RM: In graduate school I would use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to make scientific figures, and at some point I started also using these tools to make art. I’m really interested in color, light and symmetry, and I got inspired to make artwork based on the idea of kaleidoscopes. I took pictures of colorful reflections on a textured piece of aluminum foil, and then I digitally cut out and reflected portions of those pictures over and over to form hexagons. I tend to lean more toward making physical pieces rather than digital art, but I enjoy exploring the possibilities for combining the two techniques, such as incorporating images of my handwriting and drawings or other images with a direct link to physical objects into digital art.
AW: As I look at your work, I notice that you’re interested in sustainability. You repurpose found objects by using them in your work, but you also altered pages of your dissertation to create a series. Have you always had this interest in sustainability? When did you see it emerge as an artistic technique?
RM: I’ve always had an interest in sustainability, and I’ve pursued this interest in my career by learning about and using green chemistry, which is an approach to doing chemistry in a resource-efficient and inherently safe way. In graduate school I began thinking a lot about materials’ properties and why different materials have their particular characteristics. Paying attention to materials in this way then manifested itself in incorporating more types of materials into my artwork.
It was around the same time that I learned about chemical methods for making new materials out of waste, and I started to imagine how waste materials in my own daily life could become something of value. My last job was centered around plastic packaging sustainability, and I began to take notice of the variety of plastic packaging materials I came across and to incorporate those materials into my art as well.
When I use a material like plastic packaging in art, I don’t necessarily want the branding to be a focal point, but I do like to leave some markings and textures visible to hint at the material’s origins. I hope that by using unconventional art materials like plastic film, my artwork might spark a viewer’s curiosity and lead them to look at everyday materials in a new light.
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