Science and Culture: How fish innards inspire art.

Looking down a microscope at dead fish for eight months can change an artist’s perspective on nature— and even influence her art. Textile artist Annet Couwenberg discovered such anatomical insights first hand when, in the summer of 2014, she embarked on a stint in the laboratory as part of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a program that lets artists access the museum’s vast collections. Her intense exploration of specimens in the museum’s fish division allowed her to see the complexity of bony structural forms in high resolution and incorporate those forms in her work. The Dutch-born Couwenberg uses fabrics, polymers, and buckram—a rough cotton common in bookbinding—to mold large hanging or free-standing 3D structures. In her cluttered studio, located in the basement of her Baltimore home, bolts of cloth creased at regular intervals lie spread out on the floor or hang on the walls. Except for the large work table in the center, the space doesn’t look much like a conventional artists’ studio. There are no paintings or statues, just a jumble of symmetrical constructions. Couwenberg’s fellowship project at the Smithsonian, called “Skeleton and Skin,” was inspired by the X-ray imaging of fish and other water creatures, created by the Smithsonian’s Sandra Raredon. Raredon’s series explored the outer skin of the animals and the bones beneath, and Couwenberg was impressed by the combination of science and technology, as well as the beauty of the images. She decided that she wanted to use the museum’s ichthyology collections to probe the relationship between bone structure and soft tissue—a 3D form symbiotically coupled to 2D planar surfaces— with the help of imaging technology and microscopic photography. To her mind, fish anatomy offers a natural analog to her own work as a fiber artist, because so much of what she does involves building 3D forms from planar structures. After Couwenberg was accepted as a Smithsonian fellow, Lynne R. Parenti, a curator at the Division of