Elektrine lite

← Feed

Ele Willoughby, PhD

minouette@spore.social

<p>Artist, printmaker and marine geophysicist. <br />Settler in Tkaronto (she/her)</p>

Posts

  • View post

    Today is the feast day of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), here surrounded by plants &amp; a mineral she touted as medical treatments, her invented alphabet &amp; model of the universe. One of my most popular prints! Her writings preserve not only her own knowledge &amp; theories but the nature of institutional medicine &amp; folk healing of her day (which she deftly combined). While she might be best remembered today as a composer of 70 Gregorian chants &amp; musical dramas (&amp; as a Cathol...

  • View post

    Anthorite can be found in lunar &amp; cometary rocks, but Sphalerite gets my vote with cool optical/electrical properties &amp; its role in art history as main zinc ore. Zn has been used in brass &amp; bronze for centuries. Since the 18th century it was used to make ZnO pigments &amp; etching, plates. 🧵1/2 #MinCup26 #scicomm #artHistory #minerals

  • View post

    Happy birthday to #mathematician, aeronautical #engineer, philanthropist and Cherokee ‘hidden figure’ of the space race: Mary Golda Ross (1908-2008).⁠ ⁠ Great-great-granddaughter of Chief John Ross, who was forced to lead his people on the Trail of Tears, Ross attributed her success in math to the Cherokee tradition of encouraging equal education for boys and girls. 🧵1/ https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/634592877 #printmaking #sciart #womenInSTEM #Indigineer #SpaceRace #planetaryScience #lino...

  • View post

    Happy birthday to trailblazing American computer scientist Frances Elizabeth Allen (1932 – 2020) who made foundational contributions to optimizing compilers, optimizing programs and parallel computing. She was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, where she worked from 1957 to 2002 and as an emeritus fellow afterwards. She was the first woman to win the Turing Prize. 🧵1/ https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/1086564033 #printmaking #womenInSTEM #histSTM #computing #mathematician #sciart #com...

  • View post

    August 4 is International Owl Awareness so I am sharing my parliament! The delightful term for a group of owls is a parliament. I love the whimsical terms of venery for groups of animals and this is part of my ongoing series of linocut terms of venery prints. For my parliament of owls I made two columns of local owls. You can decide for yourself which are the loyal oppositions and which are the government in this parliament! 🧵1/

  • View post

    Happy birthday to #geologist &amp; oceanographic #cartographer Marie Tharp (1920-2006), whose pioneering, thorough &amp; complete ocean floor maps with Bruce Heezen, made using realms of echo sounder data, revealed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.⁠ ⁠ After studying #geology &amp; math, Maurice ‘Doc’ Ewing at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia hired her to draft 1000s of echo sounder profiles. 🧵1/5 https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/217247292 #sciart #printmaking #womenInSTEM #histsci #linocut

  • View post

    Linocut moths with cyanotype lilies of the valley! Moths are a hummingbird clearwing moth, Virgin tiger moth and a White underwing moth, all native moths here in Ontario. #multimedia #printmaking #linocut #cyanotype #moth

  • View post

    Happy birthday Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958), #chemist &amp; x-ray #crystallographer whose x-ray diffraction images were instrumental to discovering double-helix structure of #DNA, made important contributions to #carbon &amp; #virus research, was 1 of the great scientists of the 20th century.⁠ ⁠ Watson’s bio lead some to (inaccurately) joke, “What did Watson and Crick discover?” “Rosalind Franklin’s notes.” While it’s important 🧵1/ #linocut #printmaking #WomenInSTEM #histsci #mastoArt #sciart...

  • View post

    Happy birthday to pharmaceutical #chemist Alice Ball (1892-1916) who developed 1st effective treatment for #leprosy. Though her life was cut tragically short, her research saved 1000s from exile &amp; painful, ineffective lifelong treatment for leprosy, &amp; she was a trailblazer for both women &amp; Black scientists.⁠ ⁠ Ball studied #chemistry at UW earning a BSc &amp; 2nd degree in pharmacy 2 years later. 🧵 https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/578429732 #printmaking #sciart #BlackInSTEM #wom...

  • View post

    It’s World Whale and Dolphin Day to celebrate these fabulous marine mammals and raise awareness about threats like pollution, climate change and illegal hunting. Here are my humpback, orca and blue whale linocuts. https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/780785898 #linocut #printmaking #sciart #whale

  • View post

    Happy birthday to #astronomer Vera Rubin (neé Cooper, ‘28-‘16) &amp; her discovery that angular motion of galaxies deviates from predictions, 1st evidence for dark matter, now known as 5x as common as matter &amp; the stuff which dictates dynamics of galaxies &amp; evolution of our universe! The Nobel committee waited 3 years after she died to reward another for the theory of dark matter. 🧵1/ https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/1393796836 #printmaking #sciart #linocut #mastoArt

  • View post

    It’s National Moth Week, July 18-26 to celebrate the beauty, lifecycles and habitat of moths, so I’m reposting my eclipse of moths (the delightful term of venery for a group of moths). This hand-printed lino block print shows five of the noctural moths of Ontario in front of the moon at a lunar eclipse. The five moths are: the gorgeous green Luna moth (Actias luna), the yellow and purplish-pink Imperial moth (Eacles imperialis), 🧵1/2

  • View post

    Happy birthday to Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (1921-2011) medical physicist &amp; Nobel laureate for radioimmunoassay for measuring concentrations of molecules in blood. Born to an immigrant Jewish family in the Bronx she went to Hunter College, tuition-free, their 1st physics major &amp; graduated with honours by 19. WWII meant the chance for grad school for woman. At U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she was only woman amongst 400 in engineering. 🧵 https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4463578733 #wom...

  • View post

    Happy birthday to amateur pioneering American scientist, inventor &amp; women’s rights advocate Eunice Newton Foote (1819-1888) who did the earliest experiments to show the insulating effect of certain gases &amp; correctly concluded that increasing carbon dioxide levels would affect atmospheric temperature and climate, which we now call the Greenhouse Effect. This discovery was often attributed to later studies by male scientists. 🧵 #linocut #printmaking #womenInSTEM #HistSci #climateScience

  • View post

    Happy birthday to #astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell! In 1967, as a grad student she discovered the 1st radio pulsar, a highly magnetized, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of EM radiation. This radiation can only be observed when the star is pointed towards us; so, like the light from a lighthouse, it appears to pulse at a precise frequency. She had been working with her supervisor Antony Hewish &amp; others to construct a radio telescope to study quasars. 🧵 #linocut #printmaking #hists...

  • View post

    Happy World Orca Day! A keystone and indicator species for ocean health and one of my favourites to see when out at sea. https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/780785898 #WorldOrcaDay #orca #killerwhale #marinemammal #conservation #linocut #printmaking #mastoArt

  • View post

    Dandelion clocks with their fine fluffy white seed heads are a great subject for a cyanotype. I saw my neighbour was deadheading her alliums and the way the seed heads echoed the shape of the dandelions struck me. So I found myself doing the perfectly normal thing - digging through my neighbour’s garden waste for art purposes, as you do. I love their silhouettes in this cyanotype. https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4532162223 #cyanotype #printmaking #allium #dandelion #botanicalArt

  • View post

    I keep underestimating the demand for my Feynman Diagram Bauhaus print, so I made another edition! This linocut was inspired by the way the exuberant lines and shapes of Bauhaus paintings, like those of Wassily Kandinsky, reminded me Feynman diagrams showing particle reactions on the quantum scale, virtual particles and anti-particles popping out of the vacuum on borrowed mass-energy and of quantum foam. 🧵 https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/1143490034 #linocut #printmaking #quantumPhysics #sc...

  • View post

    I thought I would make a whimsical bumblebee shaped cyanotype filled with leaves from my garden (and the money plant seed pod eyes)! https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4530063012 #cyanotype #botanicalArt #bumblebee #printmaking #leaves

  • View post

    I made some cyanotypes with my son this week. We went for a walk to gather some botanical materials. I wanted to show him how you can paint the photo emulsion on paper in any shape so I made a little cat silhouette and then set it in the sun with some Virginia creeper leaves for a sweet little print. https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4530052001 #cyanotype #printmaking #botanicalArt #cat #VirginiaCreeper

  • View post

    Happy birthday to #astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921) who set the scale of our Universe. My portrait of Leavitt is printed in silvery lavender ink on Japanese kozo paper. Behind her is a line showing stellar luminosity (capital L with subscript sun-symbol, a circle with a dot) as a function of time (t). She is printed over constellations in gold (Cepheus, Cassiopeia, Draco, Ursa Minor &amp; Andromeda). ⁠🧵1/ ⁠ #linocut #printmaking #WomenInSTEM #sciart #histsci #astronomy #mastoArt

  • View post

    June 30 is Asteroid Day to raise awareness of opportunities and risks posed by asteroids, their role in the formation of our solar system, their impact in space resources and importance of protecting Earth from impact. June 30, 1908 an approximately 12-megaton explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai), Russia, like due to a meteor air burst due to the explosion of a 50 to 60 m stony asteroid - the Tunguska event. 🧵1/2

  • View post

    This is my hand-carved and hand-pulled Lino block print of a charming Grimpoteuthis octopus, one of a genus of pelagic cirrate (finned) octopods known as the dumbo octopuses. The fins reminded scientists of ears on the elephant in Disney’s 1941 film Dumbo. Hence their common name dumbo octopuses. Each print is 9.25” by 12.5” on delicate Japanese washi paper. 🧵1/2 #linocut #printmaking #sciart #dumboOctopus #octopus #mastoArt

  • View post

    Happy birthday to autodidact #mathematician Alicia Boole Stott (1860-1940), shown here with diagrams of cross-sections of 4D polytopes from her publications. Alicia came to math honestly. Her father Prof George Boole developed Boolean logic, but died when she was 4. Her mother Mary Everest Boole was an autodidact mathematician &amp; innovative math educator, who taught kids math through manipulation of objects. 🧵1/5 https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4459151187 #womenInSTEM #histsci #mathema...

  • View post

    I’ve finally completed and made a small series of my print “Our Fate is Tied To That of The Insects” available. People kept asking for the one that is on exhibit. Get your native bee and other pollinator propaganda now! https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4512155120 #linocut #printmaking #sciart #nativeBees #pollinators #mastoArt

  • View post

    Happy birthday #physicist Chien-shiung Wu (1912-1997), who came up with a truly beautiful experiment to test whether the weak force conserves parity (whether beta decay would be the same if reflected in the mirror)! In my print on the left I show Wu in her lab &amp;amp; a schematic diagram of her experiment. On the right I show her reflection, as in the mirror, &amp;amp; the mirror reflection of 🧵 https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/83367125 #linocut #sciart #particlePhysics #womenInSTEM #hist...

  • View post

    It’s the season for making some cyanotype in the sun 🌞 #cyanotype #botanicalPrint #lilyOfTheValley #floral #printmaking

  • View post

    One of my cyanotype prints of lily-of-the-valley https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4515367539 #cyanotype #lilyOfTheValley #botanicalPrint #floral #printmaking

  • View post

    Happy birthday to #philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) who, amongst other things speculated about a teapot orbiting in space. This lino block print of Russell’s Teapot is part of my series of Imaginary Friends of Science of charismatic thought experiments. In this case, the alledged china teapot, in orbit between Earth and Mars is an analogy by philosopher Bertrand Russell to make the case that the 🧵 ⠀ https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/919881895 #linocut #printmaking #SciArt #RussellsTeap...

  • View post

    This Endangered Species Day I’m sharing a bee. This #linocut print rusty-patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis) is a pollinator native to North America and was common here in Ontario as recently as the 1980s. It is now sadly on the brink of extinction, designated federal Species at Risk in Canada. On January 10, 2017, it was the first bee to be placed on the endangered species list in the US. Historically it had a large range in the eastern US from Maine to Tennessee and in Canada in southern 🧵