Imbuing science a sense of the miraculous: Illustrator Claudia Biçen on THE FORGOTTEN TEACHERS
In The Forgotten Teachers: How Nature Wrote the Story of Life, neuroscientist Brian Isett and artist Claudia Biçen guide us toward a deeper understanding of how radically interconnected all of life is by interweaving science and storytelling, spirituality and art. In celebration of the book’s publication day, we’re thrilled to share an interview with its illustrator Claudia Biçen, conducted by artist Ohara Hale on location in London.
OH: How did you get involved with this book?
CB: Brian and I have known each other for 14 years, and I always admired the work that he was doing as a neurobiologist. When I met him, he was doing his PhD at Berkeley, and then later he started doing poetry and created this beautiful book of grid poems with another friend of ours—that book idea actually came out of mine and my partner’s wedding.
We swim in these waters of people doing projects and doing them for the sake of love, and so when Brian and I went out for a drink one evening, we said, “Let's make something together!” We could bring together my artwork and his scientific background combined with his beautiful, poetic writing to create something: How can we make something that will get people to think differently about existence, and what it means to be human, and where we've come from, and our bodies and the consciousness that we inhabit?
It started vast and big, and we were so excited. We started exploring this idea of how the natural world has helped us as teachers and we are its students. Our bodies are students to this planet and to the information that is available within it, and everything that we know and everything we experience and everything we take for granted has actually been a four-and-a-half-billion-year process of learning to adapt to and be shaped by and dancing with the Earth that we're a part of.
OH: What excites you most about this project?
CB: Honestly, one of my favorite parts of the project is getting to have a creative collaborator that I respect and adore so much. We worked on this project for probably six years in the actual making process. At first, we lived in the same city, and we would meet every week and we would talk about ideas. And then eventually Brian moved to Pittsburgh, I moved to the UK, and we’d continue to meet online, talking about ideas.
If you've had a creative collaborator, you know the beauty of being able to come together and create something that transcends what you both individually are capable of doing. Brian would come with these with these theories in biology or evolutionary history that I wouldn't have normally come across, and they would blow my mind. They would be such a source of inspiration for things that I could create and make, and I would spend so much time swimming in those ideas throughout my day. As I was walking or commuting, I got to spend just hours and hours and hours thinking about these ideas. So that was my favorite part of this project: getting to create something with someone I value so much.
OH: What was the most challenging part?
CB: For me, the most challenging part of creating this book was that the goalpost in our mind kept moving. It started as one thing at the beginning, and we had decided wouldn't it be great to have one very detailed illustration for each chapter that would be very text heavy? And then as time went on, we decided to add more illustrations and have illustrations on every single page and to have six different teachers. And then we decided later, wouldn't it be great if we gave a nod to medieval scripts that had illuminated letters and illuminated titles?
The idea of the book just kept growing and growing and growing, and every element we added, we added for the benefit of the book, but I think the most challenging aspect was knowing when to stop. And honestly, the only reason I think we stopped when we stopped is because I gave birth to twins. I was heavily pregnant and I was thinking, “This project has to finish,” so I'm very grateful for that moment of really signaling that it was time to now get this work out into the world.
OH: Can you walk us through your illustration process for this book?
CB: When I tell people about my illustration process, not just for this book, but whenever I make any piece of art, ever, they are quite appalled. I don't make sketches. I've never made sketches, and I never do any mockups or anything. By the time I sit down to create something, it's probably already about 80% there. By then, I've spent many nights at 3:00 in the morning waking up and building the vision, building the vision, building the vision, so that all the pieces of the myth and the story and the metaphor are already laid out in the image.
When I sit down to create, I draw everything out with a pencil. And once that feels quite final, I will then go over everything with a pen that is waterproof so that when you come to painting the pen will be able to stay fixed. Once I've done the pen outline, I'll take all the pencil away so that now I have a very clean lined-pen drawing, and then I’ll create all of the additional layers of the watercolor to really bring it to life with the color.
And that's it! Most of these pieces, in fact, probably 95% of the pieces, were just done on the first go. And a few pieces have been adapted along the way, but largely what you see is the first time around in it.
I think this piece is a really good example of my process. This is actually the image that's on the back of the book and the idea that I really wanted to try to capture is this idea that life is really the universe showing itself to itself. That's actually a concept in Sanskrit called “lila,” which is the universe showing itself to itself through infinite play.
I had this core idea, and I asked myself: How do we represent that through biological forms? At the bottom here, we have LUCA, which is the last universal common ancestor, the single cell that unites all life on earth. But here they're taking a different evolutionary branch on the tree: on this one side we show fish becoming lizards, becoming mammals, becoming a primate here at the top; and on the other side, LUCA kind of splits off and becomes plant life.
And at the top, the branches of the tree meet again in this moment of the primate confronting and experiencing and smelling this flower in this beautiful moment of that exact concept: that, ultimately, we have all come from the same place, and here we are in this diversity of life forms as the universe showing itself to itself. And that's the piece that we wanted to have on the back of the book to represent what the book is ultimately about.
OH: Are there any particular artists or styles that influenced the work?
CB: I’ve been inspired by a lot of artists in the creation of this work, and I would say that what those artists have in common is that they are all artists that are trying to grapple with myth and with storytelling and with the transcendent. Those are the elements that I always look for and the artists that I love—for example, the work of William Blake, of Hilma af Klint, of Leonora Carrington, and then more contemporarily, the work of Rithika Merchant. All of these artists create these transcendent visions that are trying to grasp something about life and something about story and something about what connects us as human beings.
Since the very beginning, my work as a visual artist and storyteller has really always been about these core existential questions of: What does it mean to be alive and mortal in this strange universe that we find ourselves in? Where have we come from? What should we do while we're here? And, ultimately, how can we reconnect to the more-than-human world from which we've become very alienated from at this point in history?
OH: What do you hope to offer the readers of this book?
CB: When I was a teenager, I came across this quote, which is generally attributed to Albert Einstein, that goes something like this: "There are only two ways to live your life. The first is as though nothing is a miracle. The second is as though everything is a miracle." This quote has stayed with me my entire life, and it has become a principle by which I live every day.
For me, this book is about inviting the reader to spend some time in relationship with the world through the principle that everything is miraculous. I think what's interesting about the book is that you can find the majority of these ideas in a standard high school biology textbook, but they're not received in the same way in a textbook. The point of The Forgotten Teachers is to take those very same ideas, but imbue them with a sense of the miraculous and a sense of reverence. That is what we want to offer the viewer, whether you are a teenager or whether you're in your nineties, and that is the invitation: to live as though everything is miracle.
At the core of what we're trying to do with both the text and the images is to recuperate or reclaim this relationship between science and spirit, or science and the sacred. It is really an acknowledgement that for a long time now—for hundreds of years, really—there's been a break between spirituality and science, and for us, those two are not incongruent. For us, the science brings the depth of the mystery and the extraordinary nature of life, and the spirituality grounds the science and the scientific investigation in something that is also existential and emotional and deeply human. This book is about bringing those two back together, rightfully together. That is the act of recuperation that we hope to do.
As artists, we're using the tools of poetry and wonder and beauty as calls to action to people to reignite and reimagine a different relationship to the natural world, the more-than-human world: one that positions us as an intricate node in a web of millions and millions of different subjects, not as the top of the pyramid that dominates and owns the rest of the world.
The Forgotten Teachers is also about challenging our very basic conceptions—even about what self is and what time is. For example, our chapter on Theia explores this singular moment in the history of our planet when planet Theia collided with planet Earth, and how in this one moment all of these rhythms of Earth that we now know as time—as our daily time, our monthly time, our annual time—actually are these rhythms that are baked into the body and baked into our DNA. We dance to these rhythms, and we've learned to do that over billions of years. We're living at this point in time where time is perceived as this linear thing and we're marching towards progress, but actually this story is about how time is rhythmic and cyclical and grounded in these very ancient things that happened with Theia, and embedded in our DNA in this rhythmic, cyclical way. And similarly, we think of selfhood as this individual, bounded body, but when you look at the natural world and you understand science more deeply, nothing is individual. There is no such thing as an individual: everything is pinned to everything else in the universe.
And now… Enchanted Lion’s rapid-fire questions!
What is your favorite word?
CB: Delightful.
What is your least favorite word?
CB: Apathy.
Do you have any real-life role models?
CB: Hmm, I surround myself with people who inspire me in many different ways.
What is your life motto?
CB: Try everything once.
What is your idea of success?
CB: To love and be loved.
What does procrastination mean to you?
CB: Doing everything on the list before the thing I need to do.
How would you describe your monsters?
CB: Also apathy.
What is earthly happiness for you?
CB: The same as success: to love and be loved.
Where do you think we go after we die?
CB: Back into the big ocean from which we never really separated from.
THE FORGOTTEN TEACHERS
Written by Brian Isett
Illustrated by Claudia Biçen
A Kirkus Reviews Fall Preview selection!
Interweaving science and storytelling, spirituality and art, a neuroscientist and an artist guide us toward a deeper understanding of how radically interconnected all of life is.
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"Scientific storytelling and surreal art encourage respect for life and its origins in this reverential illustrated work." —Publishers Weekly
“This little beauty... is all about combining the arts and the sciences in an effort to rework our connections to the natural world." —Betsy Bird, A Fuse #8 Production (A School Library Journal blog)
"Evolutionary science concepts wrapped in philosophical and spiritual entreaties to value interconnectedness... Crossing arbitrary divisions between art and science, the book closes by asking readers, 'What story will you choose to tell?'" —Kirkus Reviews
“The Forgotten Teachers is a magnificent story of life and its emergence. Eloquently written and beautifully illustrated, this book will enchant people of all ages. It will indeed evoke awe and wonder for our planetary home that is so needed in our time.” —John Grim & Mary Evelyn Tucker, Codirectors of the Yale Forum on Religion & Ecology