Melissa Walter with HereIn

This Could Not Be the End: Study 1, 2020, graphite on cut and layered paper, 31 x 25 in.

[Image description: A piece of white paper in a white frame. The paper has small holes scattered across its surface, and a larger, gray and black circle overlaid on the upper half of the paper.]

Melissa Walter’s past art practice has focused on astrophysics and space exploration, which she investigates with rigorous compositions in a stark palette of blacks, grays, and whites. Her visually absorbing works invoke the universe’s geometry and order, as well as its enduring mystery. In addition to her artistic practice, Walter also serves as a science illustrator for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and other institutions. She makes spectacular digital images of planets and cosmic phenomena such as black holes, stellar winds, radio quasars, and x-ray auras. Her illustrations can be found on Instagram at @m.weiss_science_illustrator. She talks with HereIn about the relationship between these facets of her practice and a new direction for her fine art work. 

HereIn: Melissa, do you feel your art and science illustration are part of the same practice? Or are they largely separate?

Melissa Walter: I do make a division between my science illustration and my fine art work. The line doesn’t have to be hard-edged, it can be a gray area where some of these things fit in-between. The content crosses frequently. But I think it really comes down to context. I see the science illustration more as a learning tool than an art itself. Part of the reason is that it’s an extremely collaborative effort among the scientists, the public relations team, and myself. The majority of the time, decisions are not made based on the aesthetic choices I would prefer. The main purpose of the work is to convey a specific science and if the color I think it would look better in doesn’t tell the story that it’s meant to tell, then it doesn’t matter.

That being said, stuff like that does happen in fine art. When you have specific intent behind a work, sometimes a certain visual language won’t be the answer for you in that moment. However, I think the freedom within my fine art work is exponentially larger than it is in my science illustration. So it does really feel for me like there’s a division between this and that. I don’t know if it will always be that way, but right now I have a dual life of a literal definition of a thing and then this ethereal, abstracted definition of that same thing.

Black Hole, 2016, installation at Teros Gallery, San Diego. Photo: Michael Andrew.

[Image description: An installation in a corner of a white gallery space. The corner is painted black. Strings are attached in a circle at the top. They run down in a column that twists near the bottom and is attached in a circle on the floor.]

HereIn: I imagine you must have some educational background in science in order to do the illustration work.

Walter: I have no background in science. The pathway I wound up on was less a definitive one than that a lot of science illustrators; what they do is very rooted in science, as well as the arts. I have been an artist from a very young age and followed that trajectory through college. My freshman year of college I did take an astronomy course, but it was at 8am on a Friday, so I promptly dropped it. I think at that point in my life I was more interested in my independence than my education. I always think back to that as my great moment of irony. 

I didn’t approach this kind of subject until my senior year of college at the University of Rhode Island, where I got a BFA in studio art. There was a computer lab and some computer design courses, but there weren’t many of them. I really gravitated toward that as a medium and spent the majority of my time in the computer lab. As a result, a lot of other departments would come to me when they needed a flyer or something designed. That translated into getting a fellowship with the Rhode Island Partnership in Infectious Disease Control, where I worked on a project to help educate people about the dangers of ticks. It was all because I was the one student at that time who was interested in doing things digitally. This was in the 90s, so digital work within the arts wasn’t quite what it is now.

Of All Things, 2019, installation with paper and acrylic, ICE Gallery, San Diego. Photo: Studio Maha.

[Image description: A white gallery space with a window on the right side. There is a large structure composed of thousands of small black and white pyramids. The same width as the window, it creates a band along the floor, up the wall, across the ceiling, and down the wall with the window. The window is not covered by the structure, and cutouts in the band mirror the shape of the window on the floor, wall, and ceiling.]

One of the women I worked with during that fellowship went on to work for a division of NASA. She was working on a brand new mission that hadn’t launched yet. They were preparing to do some press about the mission and they needed an illustration of a black hole. She reached out to me to do that and it was the catalyst for my life in astronomy. It’s not the usual path people take, by any means. I think I’m a good example of the idea that nothing’s written in stone. 

HereIn: What fundamentally drives your fine art practice? What are the artistic and conceptual questions you’re interested in?

Walter: It’s ever-changing. I was set on this path to consider the work I’d been doing for so long in my job as a science illustrator. There was a driving force to create my own relationship with astronomy that I hadn’t explored previously, even though I was working full-time with the subject. But within the last year there has been a significant shift in where I would like my work to go. I think that’s in response to the louder conversations that are being had these days, especially dealing with mental health in relationship to solitude and the pandemic. I’ve really been thinking about trauma and depression, what happens to our brain and our body within this context. I’m still guided by framing them in a way that’s related to science, because that’s how I make sense of things. So I’m learning more about neurology, which has been difficult for me, to say the least. While astronomy hasn’t been as difficult, that’s only because I’ve had a twenty-two year relationship with it. Neurology is a whole new language for me. 

Left: Cortisol, 2020, acrylic paint, charcoal, and graphite on wood, 40 x 30 in.
Right: Cortisol installation, 2020, acrylic paint, charcoal, and graphite on wood, shag rug, and rocking seat, Bread & Salt, San Diego.

[Image description, left: A monochromatic painting with areas of inky black swept across a soft black background. Right: An installation in a small gallery space with white walls. On the back wall hangs a black painting. A person with light skin and short hair, wearing a blue patterned blouse, sits on a black object that rests on a black rug.]

One thing I want to do with my work is to not just present the clinical conversation of what is happening within our own bodies and minds, but also include some level of healing within the work that is based on of scientific evidence. The piece Cortisol, which I installed at Bread & Salt gallery in 2020, is a good example. In that installation, there was a painting with swashes of black acrylic on graphite. Also in the small space was an object, which you would sit on and rock while you were viewing the work on the wall. With the painting, I was making an attempt to figure out how to visualize the hormone cortisol, which your brain is washed in when you experience trauma or depression. 

In my research I learned about our limbic systems that control how our brain is functioning and different ways to heal that. There are a lot of ways we already know about, like exercise and meditation. The actions of doing these things physically heal your brain while you’re doing them. Another way that I learned you can heal your limbic system is the simple action of rocking, in the morning and the evening, just a few minutes a day. So I wanted to include in the installation an object that somebody could sit on and rock while viewing the painting. This was my introduction to finding ways of giving visual information about what is happening to us during hard moments while at the same time giving us an avenue to heal in that moment. If you are interacting with the work, you are actually healing. I’m wanting to continue that path of inquiry. Obviously we called art a “practice” for a reason, because we’re trying to figure stuff out and we don’t necessarily have the answers. So I’m still navigating that language.

300 Days, 2020, paint, salt, and graphite on board, 59 1/4 x 17 1/4 in.

[Image description: A tall, thin painting. A faint gray grid is overlaid on a black surface that bears a gray pattern reminiscent of the surface of the planet Mars.]

HereIn: You’re thinking about these huge questions, and then your work is meticulous and precise. What is it like being in the studio trying to balance these fundamental questions about much of human experience with the detailed, physical process of making the work?

Walter: I think a lot of our conversations today is about before 2020 and during 2020, a comparison. With the work I was doing in the past that falls into the category you’re talking about— the precision and the meticulous ways of description— I’m focusing on the macro: the universe outside of ourselves and the wonder we find there. There is a lot of chaos out there, but at the same time there are these really interesting details that I’ve come to understand. There are certain rules that our Universe follows even within that chaos. Stars follow certain paths through life and death. Though black holes provide a lot of questions, they also behave in specific ways. Using precise techniques made a lot of sense in translating that. In using this minimalist imagery I was trying to get to the core of these ideas and describe them in the simplest possible terms, because they are big and complicated. 

This Could Not Be the End: Study 6, 2020, charcoal on gouged paper, 31 x 25 in.

[Image description: A piece of white paper in a white frame. The paper has a vertically oriented black rectangle on it, with rows of many white gouge marks covering the black surface. Beyond the black rectangle, gray smudges the paper’s white surface.]

But this year I’ve been looking more at the human experience and getting into the micro, instead. For example, in work like the series This Could Not Be the End, while the visual language is a minimalist palette and repetitiveness remains within those pieces, there’s more visceral action, from the perspective of making the work. While I was still thinking about astronomy, I was thinking about it in the context of the human experience. These works were made before the pandemic hit. I was thinking about the astronaut experience of extended space travel. That forced solitude within a confined space and what would happen to the human psyche. In the end, that resulted in something that was messier and more physical than work I had made in the past. I see that as a direct result of considering human emotion as opposed to the physics of space. 

Left: This Could Not Be the End: Study 6 (detail), 2020, charcoal on gouged paper, 31 x 25 in.

Right: This Could Not Be the End: Study 1 (detail), 2020, Graphite on cut and layered paper, 31 x 25 in.

[Image description, left: Rows of white gouge marks across a velvety black surface. Right: White paper with differently sized holes scattered across the surface. In the upper right corner, a section of a variegated black and gray circle intrudes on the white surface.]

HereIn: Something I see carrying over from that strictly minimalist work into the new work that has this tactile, visceral element is repetition. What is your experience in the studio like with this repetitive process? 

Walter: I think I’ve always felt a sense of comfort with these repetitive actions. I was doing stippling for a really long time and you can’t get more repetitive than that. There is some level of comfort I find in not only in making millions of dots within a single work but then also the final visual of it brings me comfort, as well. Perhaps I’m healing my own limbic system in the process. 

This conversation was edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.