Jayanne English puts the Cosmos on Canvas

Jayanne English is a Canadian professor of astronomy who investigates the evolution of galaxies. She tackles questions like 'how do galaxies change when interacting with each other's gravitational pull?' But she also makes images for public outreach. You'll see some of her most popular and recent as you scroll through this article.

Normally based at the University of Manitoba, Jayanne is spending her sabbatical at Wadham. It’s her second time doing so. “You’re a fan of Wadham?” I ask. “Oh yes”, she replies. More on why later, she promises. She's come to learn from exchanges with collegial experts and to engage with collaborations at Oxford's sub-department of Astrophysics.

Jayanne’s images convert black-and-white measurements into something easily digestible by human vision. Through them, a galaxy’s radiation can be presented in striking colour. And through them, astronomers can ‘speak’ directly to the public. “There’s no intermediary,” Jayanne explains. She isn’t a third-party member of the media, bridging the gap between scientist and laity. She’s both scientist and visual communicator.

That Jayanne possesses both the astronomical expertise and a designer’s eye reflects her roundabout route into science. Not that she intended it to be complex. “I wanted to be an astronomer since junior high school,” she shares. When she hit university age, she enrolled for an astronomy degree. But the environment at the time was very challenging. “There were only six women in a crowd of around two hundred students for physics,” she says. “I dropped out.”

She took up art instead at what is now called the Ontario College of Art and Design. But she could never shake off science completely. “All of my art projects were about science,” she laughs. Eventually, her cousin said she should go back to school for science. And that’s what she did. Jayanne admits that her hopes for ever becoming a professor were low, “given my age – having initially dropped out and returning eleven years later – and being a woman.” Yet after a few post-doc positions, she got the first permanent academic post she applied for. It was at the University of Manitoba, where she still works today.

It was, however, in the period between her PhD and starting at Manitoba that she first got to work on public outreach images. She had a couple years working at NASA, co-ordinating their Hubble Heritage Project. It was strenuous work that saw Jayanne and her team release images to the public every month. Jayanne herself worked directly with the scientists, who had to be assured that their data were being represented correctly, while also fielding calls from the media, handling press releases, and building websites.

“What was that time at NASA like?” I ask. Jayanne pauses. “People usually want the ‘astronaut’ answer,” she replies. That is, people like to picture a close-knit team of scientific heroes working in unison to make the impossible happen. But while Jayanne is clear about her gratitude to have been at the swirling centre of such a hub of science, she admits it was a struggle. She pins it on a cultural difference between her collaborative Canadian background the more competitive US context.

In addition, it was a time when visualising data for public communication was new. Not everyone saw the value of the project. As abstract as their traditional contour plots were, many of the scientists “thought everything was already clear, as long as they presented a legend.” There was a tendency for the scientists to want a lot of control over the image production process, Jayanne reflects.

She’s thankful that things are different today. “I use to call my talk on visualising astronomy, ‘Cosmos vs Canvas’. Now it’s just ‘Cosmos and Canvas’. I no longer presume I’m speaking to people who see the two opposed.” Indicative of this greater appreciation for her work, she was given the 2021 Qilak Award for Astronomy Communications, Public Education and Outreach from the professional Canadian Astronomical Society/Société Canadienne d’Astronomie and two amateur societies.

I asked her what changed. “Turns out, these images wield a bit of political power.” She tells the story of how NASA needed a mission done to service and repair the Hubble Space Telescope, but the head administrator of NASA didn’t want the shuttle to fly. He thought it was too risky. “But the public had been told that this was the best telescope ever built in all of time,” Jayanne explains, “and part of that story was made by the public outreach images. So the public rose up in outcry.” The servicing mission was re-instated and a new administrator was appointed.

But it’s not all politics. Jayanne cites technological developments. Computers started to have colour displays with full-blown graphical interfaces. People were no longer working with monochrome command line operating systems. “And then, Powerpoint presentations became a thing.” This all steered users toward visual, graphical modes of conveying data. And to seal the deal, scientists started to see the value of the images for their own scientific research. “A scientist would see an image produced for public outreach, and then the scientist would discover new things in their data.”

I ask Jayanne why she values making these images. “It’s a very intense process to make them,” she reflects, more used to explaining why we, the public, like them, than why she does. “It seems like a compulsion. Yeah, I'm compelled to make them.” After a few introspective seconds, Jayanne starts to articulate why.

Partly, it’s the excuse they give her to widen her knowledge. “For me, it’s a big discovery process,” she smiles. While galaxies are her own topic of research, she’ll get image requests from much further afield. “NASA will email me and say, hey can you make this image from our gamma ray data?” She gets to visually explore fields she’d never normally touch.

And then there’s the artistic outlet: “artists never stop applying art to all of their life,” she shares. Normally, that’s hard when you’re a Professor. (“You don’t have a lot of time to play with colour.”) But creating images is part of her job.

Clearly, Jayanne sees the images as outlets for artistic impulses but she is reticent to say that the images themselves are art. She approvingly paraphrases art historian, James Elkin: “the concerns of the people making these images have nothing to do with the concerns of artists.” The images represent science, but they do not have the kind of ‘exploratory’ concerns that art has, Jayanne explains. “They aren’t dealing with cultural or social issues.”

But the longer she muses, the less sure she is. Debating with herself, she paraphrases another academic, Martin Kemp. “He would say it much more politely,” she caveats, “but essentially: who cares?” That is, either way, the images are striking and interesting and deserve to be shown. (No argument from me). After pondering the views of a third figure, she shrugs, and confesses, “I think I have to change my mind and think maybe they are encroaching on the art field.”

Either way, Jayanne is clear that there is at least one unifying thread between her images and her purely scientific work. “In science, it’s rare to have single-author papers,” she notes; “all my art is the same. It’s collaborative.” She unpacks a recent example – a collaboration with Emily Gong. Emily, working in Oxford at the time, was introduced to Jayanne via Wadham’s Fellow in Physics, Martin Bureau. The two bonded over growing up in Toronto and their love of art. Together they produced a huge installation at Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning in China. The piece was a metal structure with transparent paintings that represented the route taken by a self-driving bus.

Sadly, Jayanne has been unable to visit the installation. For a while, there was some political heat between China and the University of Manitoba. (The story involves an adjunct-professor there who may have leaked microbiological materials or technology to the Chinese government…) And just as a visit was starting to look feasible again, the pandemic happened.

Another thing the pandemic prevented, of course, was a trip to Wadham. Our conversation circles back to her love of the College. It all started with a porter's words. Years ago, she had been assigned to Wadham for her accommodation while working on a project in Oxford. As the porter carried her luggage to her room, "he asked how I felt to be staying in a room older than my country. And I just got this thrill!"

She then realised that her colleague, Martin Bureau was a Wadham Fellow. She joined the Senior Common Room and got a taste of the community. "The High Table was brilliant. It was like a mix of Hogwarts, Downton Abbey, and a TED talk!" She speaks highly of the welcoming culture and the College's commitment to accessibility and diversity. "It goes against the myths of Oxford," she shares; "You'll ask someone their background and they'll reply, 'my Dad is a miner in Wales', y'know?"

It sounds like Jayanne has got Wadham figured out! I wish her the best for the rest of her sabbatical here and thank her for her time.

Interview by Wadham's Website & Communications Assistant. Jayanne has more images on her website, along with talks and other resources. Check them out at the link below.