Martha Fleming

Martha Fleming has been working as an artist, curator, writer and academic in the nexus between science, humanities and the arts for over two decades. She holds an MA from the University of London in the History of the Book and her PhD from the School of Art, Architecture and Design of Leeds Metropolitan University is entitled "From Le Musée des Sciences to the Science Museum: fifteen years of evolving methodologies in the art/science interface." She is currently a Fellow of the UK National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts and is a Visiting Associate Professor at the Medical Museion of the University of Copenhagen.

Beginning with Le Musée des Sciences in 1984 – a large-scale collaborative site work with Lyne Lapointe created in an abandoned beaux-arts post-office in Montreal – Fleming has been investigating the social, economic and philosophical reasons behind the arbitrated rift between art and science for some twenty years. She has exhibited in museums and galleries and made site-specific projects on three continents in New York, Madrid, London and Sao Paulo among others.

She has been Artist in Residence at the Science Museum (London) and the Institute of Astronomy of Cambridge University; Senior Research Fellow at the Leeds School of Art, Architecture and Design; Development Manager at the Royal Society; founding Trustee of the Dennis Rosen Memorial Trust; and a judge of the Wellcome Trust sciart awards. She has taught in art schools in Canada, the UK and the USA.

She has worked to forge productive methodological alignments across disciplines in a variety of arenas. Martha is able to integrate both practice and theory in meticulous and rigorous ways that allow for apparently disparate activities such as aesthetics, visual culture, and scientific method to be compared, contrasted and conjoined. She has received a number of awards for her work from the Canada Council for the Arts, Art Matters New York, The Foundation for Sport and others. She is a longstanding member of the British Society for the History of Science and the International Association for Word and Image Studies, and has both lectured and published widely.

martha[AT]marthafleming[DOT]net

Detail of one of the 16 installations from from Martha Fleming's exhibition Atomism & Animism (Science Museum, London, 1999), a museum-wide collection interpretation project investigating cultural and phenomenological relations between scientific and artistic methodologies through objects.