In 1997 we were contacted by artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey who create art works by projecting light through a photographic negative onto a canvas sown with germinating grass. As the grass grows, the positive image is imprinted in it because the amount of chlorophyll that develops is proportional to the intensity of the light it receives.

The artists were interested in using our mutant grass with the stay-green character to help them preserve their images while the canvases were allowed to dry - drying grass causes it stress, which normally makes it senesce and lose chlorophyll.

The stay-green grass turned out to be very useful in preventing this, meaning that the artworks can be exhibited for many months in the dry state.

Our work together continued with funding from the Wellcome Trust SciArt initiative, and we were subsequently awarded a Pioneer Project grant from the UK National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), to support our collaboration. This enabled Heather and Dan to spend two periods as artists-in-residence at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research Aberystwyth.

This unique collaboration between artists and scientists received a lot of media interest and opened up new ways of bringing the underlying science to public attention.

Heather and Dan received the 2000 L'Oreal Grand Prix for The Art and Science of Color. Articles about the award and collaboration appeared in journals, magazines and newspapers worldwide.

Subsequently the artists and scientists made several joint presentations in connection with major exhibitions of the work at such venues as London 's Victoria and Albert Museum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Gallery in Boston, the Beaconsfield Gallery and even Aberystwyth Arts Centre.

The science behind the art is discussed here in terms of investigative and imaginative vision:

Heather and Dan have diversified their interactions with science to engage with action on climate change, though they continue to work with grass too, notably in their large-scale works transforming public buildings as seen in Dilston Grove (2003) and FlyTower (2007).

Learn more about their past, recent and current work by visiting the Artsadmin website. Looking to the future, our friend Terry Trickett (who first coined the term Sci-Art) has put our work with Heather and Dan in the context of his vision for Sci-Art Lab.