Penelope Rose Cowley

​I am an multimedia artist based in Cardiff, primarily focusing on what is known in the public eye as “art sci”: creating works of art that explore scientific concepts and find new ways to imagine, explain and represent concepts that can be very difficult to communicate through graphs, terminology and statistics alone. Simply put: it blends scientific data with imagination and creativity to celebrate cutting edge ideas at the frontiers of our exploration of the universe in which we find ourselves.

Commissioned by academic departments in Wales and England such as the University College London’s astrophysics unit and the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), I have created large-scale paintings, videos and illustrations exploring concepts ranging from a variety of scientific fields: particle physics, cosmology, dark matter, gravitational waves, geometry, the golden ratio, mathematical patterns, infinity, and most recently, neuroscience and consciousness.

For more detailed information on each of my academic commissions, please head to the ARTSCI section. My work has been published in Physics World, CERN Courier, CCQ, and a wide variety of academic and institutional blogs.
I work through the mediums of collages, bilateral ink or pencil illustrations, digital art, video, and (primarily) oil on canvas paintings.

Though my work has primarily focused on cosmology and neuroscience, I am not limited to any scientific field, and am passionate about meeting new researchers, exploring new ideas, and delivering innovative commissions using the methods I have developed over the years.

My methodology in “artsci” is to first immerse myself in the complexity of the research, ideas and data by conversing intimately with the scientists to fully dive into their thoughts and ideas. The information – so new to me as an artist and not a scientifically trained researcher – is complex and chaotic to begin with. Thus it is through the sharing of ideas that I begin to visualize an artwork, and the seed is sown in my brain. Over time, as the thoughts turn through my mind and the seed germinates and grows, I start to intuitively feel how the artwork should form. My creative process essentially involves defining that chaos, and distilling it into an elegant and comprehensible simplicity.

My training is purely artistic – I received my Ba Hons in Fine Art from the Cardiff School of Art and Design in 2001, and then completed Professional Graduate Certificate in Education in Further Education at the University of Wales in Newport in 2006. I have been tutoring artists of all ages and abilities since 2016 to impart my knowledge and techniques to empower new artists to bring their own visions to life.

I began my career creating a variety of more “conventional’ illustrations and paintings, ranging from semi-erotic figurative anatomical artworks to bilateral drawings of animals. But over the years I have been increasingly drawn to explore ideas from some of the most technically complex, mathematically intricate and truly mind-boggling revelations from the towers and laboratories of academia. Perhaps I seek to merge art and science to calm the turbulations of the ultimate puzzle – what does it mean to exist – and to ponder and discover science’s ultimate promise: What next?