In April 2025, artist Julia Oldham was invited by Prof. Andrew Richardson to give a talk in the Ecoinformatics Lecture series at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff. Julia had the chance to share her artistic works and creative approach, as well as engage in discussions about a wide range of ecosystem science topics with faculty, researchers and students.
“Using canopy greeness as a way to learn about the forest is really fascinating to me. This translation of landscape into a color field is the thing that I am so excited about right now because it is this perfect, beautiful point of overlap for both artistic and scientific inquiry. Artists have been translating landscapes into color fields for a very long time and scientists do that too. While scientists and artists have very different goals and agendas, we have certain really beautiful overlaps of our process” – Julia Oldham
“I knew that Julia had been working a bit with PhenoCam images from several different sites, but until she gave her presentation and showed some of her work, I really had no idea just how creatively and imaginatively she was using these photographs in her art. I always knew that there had to be so many different ways PhenoCam images could be used for different applications, but I never quite expected to see the kinds of things Julia has been working on.
What I really found interesting about Julia’s work is that she’s not using art as a tool for science communication, which I think is what we often think of when we think of the intersection of science and art. Instead, she is actually creating art from raw scientific documents - the high-frequency PhenoCam images, snapshots of what an ecosystem looked like at a particular point in space and time - and through processing and manipulation turning those digital image files into something new and different, giving us an entirely new perspective on the world around us.” – Andrew Richardson