Andrew Carnie is a British artist and academic who works in fine art. He often collaborates with scientists to incorporate scientific concepts and research into his artwork. Some of his most notable time-based works that use slide projection include Magic Forest, made in collaboration with neuroscientists about neuron development, and Disperse, exploring ideas about the dispersal of the human body after death. His work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries in Europe and the United States.

1. andrew carnie
artist

2. Andrew Carnie
Is an artist and academic. He is currently part of the teaching team in Fine Arts at Winchester School of
Art, University of Southampton, England. He was born in 1957. He studied chemistry and painting at
Warren Wilson College, North Carolina, then zoology and psychology at Durham University, before
starting and finishing a degree in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London. Andrew then completed his
Masters degree in the Painting School, at the Royal College of Art. He has continued as a practising artist
ever since. In
2003 he was the Picker Fellow at Kingston University.
His artistic practice often involves a meaningful interaction with scientists in different fields as an early
stage in the development of his work. There are also other works that are self-generated and develop
from pertinent ideas out side science. The work is often time-based in nature, involving 35mm slide
projection using dissolve systems or video projection onto complex screen configurations. In a darkened
space layered images appear and disappear on suspended screens, the developing display absorbing the
viewer into an expanded sense of space and time through the slowly unfolding narratives that evolve
before them.
His work has been exhibited at the Science Museum, London, the Natural History Museum, Rotterdam,
the Design Museum, Zurich, at Amnesty International Headquarters London, at the School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine, London and Exit Art, in New York, the Williams College Museum of Art, and the Great
North Museum, Newcastle. He regularly exhibits with GV Art in London. A new static version of Magic
Forest has been installed at the Wellcome Trust headquarters, London. His work is represented in
collections in England, Germany, and America.
Increasingly he talks about his collaborations with scientists and recently he was a keynote speaker at the
SLSA, Society of Literature Science and the Arts, conference in Amsterdam, and completed a web radio
show for PS 1 in New York.

3. early sculpture

8. early biological work

11. magic forest

15. Magic Forest. 2002.
Was made for the exhibition Head On in 2002, a show at the Science Museum on neurology
and the brain. The work was produced in collaboration with Wellcome Foundation. The final
work is a dream-like journey through a sea of developing neurones, expanding and expanding
in number. The work was dependent on research about the Spanish anatomist Santiago
Ramon Y Cahal and on the contemporary work of Dr Richard Wingate of the Medical Research
Centre for Developmental Neurobiology, Kings College, London. Magic Forest was shown at
the Science Museum in March 2002, at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Rotterdam, Holland, 2003
and at the Natuurmuseum, Rotterdam, a show called Mensbeeld, in 2004, in Simply Complex
at the Design Museum in Zurich in 2005, and in Neuroculture, at the Westport Art Centre,
Connecticut, USA in 2006. Two articles have appeared in the journal Nature about Magic
Forest. A static version of the time-based piece is now based at the Wellcome Trust
Headquarters, London.

17. disperse

20. Disperse. 2002.
A dissolve work made for the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London,
in 2002. Ostensibly Disperse is a work that explores the hygiene aspects of the
disposal of the body after death through various cultural forms of burial, from
cremation to burial at sea. More though, it relates to thoughts about the departure
of the human body at death. The work looks at processes of how the body might
be physically dispersed; be rendered back to atomic particles. This work was
shown later at the Headquarters of Amnesty International, London, at the
Winchester Gallery, Winchester and at Kingston University during the Drawing
conference of 2005.

22. farenheight 451

24. 451. 2004.
Is a panoramic work over six meters wide and two and half meters tall. It is a slide-
dissolve work where a panoply of household objects, from tables and chairs to a roast
joint, from a suitcase to a car, appear on the screen and then gradually disappear in
flames as they fall from top to bottom. The images are projected from front and then
from the back by four projectors, two each side. The slides fall on layered screens
between the projectors, one image coming from one end and then the next arising
from the other as the first image falls away. 451 was first shown at the Winchester
Gallery 2004, this was the first chance to show a collection of time-based slide
dissolve works based on the transitory and cyclic life of objects and the body. Also
exhibited were the works Disperse and Calcium Caving.

25. we are where we are

29. WAWWA. 2006.
With Arts Council Funding and linked with neuro-architects and scientists the work We
Are Where We Are was developed for the Space, Architecture and the Mind
conference March 2006, part of Art and Mind, www.artandmind.org. The work, an
examination of the architecture of the body, is projected by eight slide projectors onto
a square of voile screens. The piece can be viewed from inside or outside the square.
Through a sequence of slides, the various systems and component structures of the
body come and go on a gigantic scale and walking figures come and go through the
body forms created. Prints from the work were exhibited in the London Print Studio
Gallery in 2006.

32. thank you for looking