Two sides or more

Duality is a hallmark of Gerd Maul's sculpture, which is fitting for a man who leads a double life. By day, Maul is a professor in the gene expression and regulation program at the Wistar Institute, immersed in a world of fluorescence microscopy, microarrays, and data analysis. By night, he bends metal, makes prints, and carves wood and plaster into works of art, many of which were on display this fall at the Highwire Gallery in downtown Philadelphia.

One recent work, "Two Sides or More II," is a melding of wood, lead and bronze that transforms from a sensuously shaped cherry tree root to an abstract conglomeration resembling veins and internal organs as the viewer walks around it. Another piece, "Neckless," begins at the base as a graceful sculpture of a bone, perhaps a femur, then morphs smoothly into a vertebral structure at the top.

"In the science field, [art] sounds a bit fuzzy, and my science in the artistic field sounds so rational, but I can only tell you I feel that I work with the same principles, we just use different materials," says Maul.

Many scientists would agree that hypothesis generation is creative -- perhaps even artistic -- but Maul carries the comparison further, oscillating seamlessly between his science and his art. "I see what's unusual out of the mass of material that's under the microscope...and those things I look at," he says, a description that seems to cover both endeavors. In the lab, this eye for the unusual has led him to discover and characterize important structures on the cell nucleus, including ND10 or PML bodies, which are critical components of the cell's innate defenses against viruses. Artistically, the same habit of observation pulls his work toward surprising biomorphic forms.
Some pieces are more explicitly narrative, such as "Bilateral Mastectomy," which includes two female figures, one despairing and one joyful, formed from flat sheet-metal. Maul explains that while the despairing figure is shiny, suggesting a recent operation, he deliberately left the joyful figure outdoors to develop a layer of rust, showing its survival for five years against the elements.

Maul also has a whimsical streak, which can be discerned in both his artwork and the multilayered digressions that pepper his German-accented speech. While discussing the meanings of his sculptures, he meanders back into the seemingly unrelated topic of ND10, a name he says originally stood for "nuclear dots, ten per cell." Eventually, Maul and his colleagues discovered the dots' role in antiviral immunity, so now he says that the ND stands for "nuclear defense."

Then, like a Moebius strip, he suddenly wraps the point back to art, explaining how the meaning of a piece, like the meaning of ND, can shift. "I sometimes use large decorative aspects, and then have some small aspect for the second look," he says, pointing to a piece entitled "Bird Watching a Man Buggering the Great Big Griffin." The sculpture features a large, elegantly curved loop with a smaller sculpture standing inside it. On closer approach, one can discern an abstract figure that resembles the surreal scene described in the title.

Asked how he finds time to be both an artist and a scientist, Maul points to a haiku he composed, which hangs on his office wall: "Whenever leaves fall/I will go to find lost time/Wherever it hides."

As demanding as the creation of art can be, Maul adds that in some ways, it is a welcome refuge from science: " [I]n the visual arts there is the freedom from having to prove everything," he explains in his artist's statement for the Highwire show, "with the caveat that what is created is only a starting point in the minds of those who observe and care to look, redefining what it is by themselves."


Alan Dove
mail@the-scientist.com

(Editor's note: In our December issue, we feature Maul's scientific work, in particular his search for a vaccine for CMV. To read that article, click here. For a slideshow of Maul's work as a sculptor, click here.)

Links within this article:

A. Dove, "A Long Shot on Cytomegalovirus," The Scientist, Dec. 1, 2006
http://www.the-scientist.com/2006/12/1/40/1

Wistar Institute
http://www.wistar.upenn.edu/about_wistar/overview.html

Slideshow of Gerd Maul sculptures
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/home/36890/

Highwire Gallery
http://www.kenbmiller.com/highwire/index.html

Gerd Maul
http://www.wistar.org/research_facilities/maul/research.htm

Maul Artist's Statement
http://www.kenbmiller.com/highwire/artists/gerd_maul/gerd_maul.html