viz.

Julian Voss-Andreae earned a Masters in quantum physics at the University of Vienna, participating in a seminal experiment demonstrating quantum behavior for buckminsterfullerenes.  He then left academia to become a full-time sculptor in order to express his powerful artistic response to the scientific phenomena he'd been immersed in.  

One of Voss-Andreae's best-known works is "Quantum Man," which, seen from front or back appears to be solid.  Seen from the side, it almost disappears.  Quantum Man represents quantum physics, which, Voss-Andreae explains, reveals that electrons are not discrete points, but "fuzzy."  In the quantum world, "things ultimately do not have a hard edge or some sort of well-defined boundary where one thing ends and another one starts."  The Quantum Man sculpture's vertical metal sheets represent the fact that, according to quantum physics, particles in motion have "the features of a moving wave with wave fronts running perpendicular to the direction of its motion."  Quantum Man's startling disappearing act as the viewer shifts perspective symbolizes "the dual nature of matter with the appearance of classical reality on the surface and cloudy quantum behavior underneath."  (Voss-Andreae's article, Towards Quantum Sculpture, is available on his website.)

Quantum Man is a bit atypical for Voss-Andreae, in that most of his work portrays the infinitesimal: molecules such as protein chains, and subatomic scenes.

So like other artists Eileen has discussed on viz. such as Luke Jerram, Voss-Andreae makes microscopic natural phenomena visible to the human eye by enlarging them, and also by building them in materials and forms that capture our imagination.  Voss-Andreae has set himself an admirable but difficult goal.  We can easily recognize Jerram's microbe sculptures as life forms.  Voss-Andreae, on the other hand, portrays molecules and subatomic phenomena that most of us cannot immediately recognize as such, and understand little even with explanation.

Voss-Andreae has provided explanation of his visual vocabulary in interviews and his own writing, enough for any student of visual rhetoric to explore.  What interests me more here, though, is his writing about his general goals: his sculptures, he wrote in an article in Leonardo, "offer a sensual experience of a world that is usually accessible only through the intellect."  Elsewhere, he says

"I am not after some kind of intellectual understanding.  I want to make work that appeals foremost to the senses and is ideally intuitively recognized as meaningful.  The conscious thoughts come after that....  Having an intriguing sculpture in combination with the most basic knowledge like 'this is shaped after something in your body that makes you live' can get people thinking about deep questions, such as 'what does it mean to be alive?' or 'what is left of me if I subtract my biochemistry?'"

It reminds me of what Eileen wrote about the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel's fabulous drawings, which

give us “new images” of the natural world through a complex mode of artistic, mystical, and scientific vision, generating what I’ll call a visual biology of the strange....

Despite their problematic status as scientific illustration, these images make visible an eerie vitality that connects organic life. Their artistry invokes a feeling in the viewer akin to a science-fictional alterity: these images are both familiar and strange, hence their power to alter our vision.

Voss-Andreae has also written about the occasionally negative response he gets to the idea of portraying an - to others - estoteric world which he experiences viscerally and esthetically.  "Many artists," he says seem strongly resent anything "scientific or technological....  Unfortunately, the divide many of us create between intellect and emotion, body and spirit, or art and science, is so far internalized that it actually blocks some of us from recognizing the sublime in nature if it happens to be scientifically obtained."  I resonate with this because I, too, am striving to create art that expresses my own powerful emotional and visual response to "esoteric" research (in Russian history).  I've had a similar struggle, often feeling I live between two worlds, not belonging fully to either.  But why should this be?  As Voss-Andreae remarks, the Renaissance - which we look back on as a peak of human endeavor and achievement - was all about the merging of new developments in science and art.