Art Meets Science

Late in the Summer of 1981, 142 scientists from 28 countries assembled in Grange-over-Sands to talk about worms. They were celebrating the centenary of the publication of The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, the final book published by Charles Darwin before his death the following year. Darwin’s interest in earthworms spanned over 40 years, encompassing experiments he concocted involving playing the bassoon to see how they reacted to noise, placing earthworms in a pot on top of a piano to see how they were affected by the vibrations, eating bad-smelling food and breathing on them, and observing them in the soil around Stonehenge. This fascination was shared with the academics who gathered a century later to discuss the continued impact of Darwin’s research and how it connected with their own passion about worms. 

In Autumn 2025, on the other side of Morecambe Bay, an interdisciplinary group of researchers, students, farmers, groundskeepers and artists encircled a ring of oversized earthworms emerging from the hard floor of an exhibition space in Lancaster University. These worms were part of an immersive sculptural installation and workshop led by artist, Elizabeth Clough. They became a stimulus to think about humans’ relationship with the environment, to delve into the soil and consider what is found there, and how it is affected by people’s actions, and to look up, and notice, what is, or isn’t, around us. This was related back to work and research they conduct, drawing similarities between the questions that motivate artists and scientists to explore, interpret and understand the topics that capture their interest. 

A gathering of worm experts. A collection of worm-like sculptural forms. Darwin playing his bassoon to worms to see what might happen. As well as being connected by the worms themselves, these episodes are perhaps connected by the experience of curiosity. 

The following segments offer an exploration of connections that exist between how people experience curiosity during multi-sensory aesthetic encounters and how curiosity has been conceptualised and investigated in academic research. Like a worm burrowing through the earth, we will dig into responses from participants at Clough’s workshop and a group of young people about their conception of curiosity, when they experience it, and how it relates to their work or practice. This is presented as a not-quite study, not-quite interpretation of an artwork; rather a contemplation on how, when and why art makes us feel curious and how this might connect to the world around us. 

Curiosity

In his theory of curiosity, Daniel Berlyne asks “why, out of the infinite range of knowable items in the universe, certain pieces of knowledge are more ardently sought and more readily retained than others?” (Berlyne, 1954a: 180). Berlyne, too, was interested in worms. One of his early experiments (Berlyne, 1954b) regarding human epistemic curiosity involved participants learning information about a selection of invertebrates, including two he made up: the stringworm and the sea-wasp. His work is widely acknowledged to be among the most important contributions to the contemporary understanding and exploration of curiosity, and his theoretical framework continues to underpin curiosity research in many cases. He proposed curiosity encompasses a range of behaviours that can be classified across two axes. The first distinguished between perceptual curiosity, how humans and non-humans explore the world in search of novelty; and epistemic curiosity, a human desire for acquisition of knowledge and understanding complex ideas. Perceptual curiosity may lead to someone touching a stringworm, should they happen to find one, while epistemic curiosity may drive them to study them through a range of experiments over 40 years. The second axis is between specific curiosity, seeking particular information to fill a gap in knowledge; and diversive curiosity, a more general and explorative search for novel stimuli. Someone may demonstrate diversive curiosity by distractedly following a link to read more about stringworms on Wikipedia, and specific curiosity through asking whether stringworms exist at all. 

A surge of interest in curiosity across the past three decades has generated a range of theoretical constructs. Deprivation theory posits curiosity as an intrinsically motivated drive to fill a perceived gap in knowledge, reducing feelings of uncertainty (Loewenstein, 1994). Others lean more towards the positive emotions associated with exploration and acquisition of knowledge being the driving force behind curiosity (Litman, 2005). Recently, learning progress theorists have proposed an understanding of curiosity as being motivated by the process of learning, which is in turn motivated by drives of curiosity (Poli et al., 2024). Attempts to understand and measure curiosity as multidimensional includes considering it as both a trait (some people are more curious than others) as well as a state (all people sometimes experience curiosity) (Silvia, 2012; Kashdan et al., 2018). The idea that curiosity can be broken down into different types, and that there are also different categories of curious people, is outlined through Kashdan and colleagues’ five-dimensional scale, which incorporates Joyous Exploration, Deprivation Sensitivity, Stress Tolerance, Social Curiosity, and Thrill Seeking. They suggest there are four types of curious people: The Fascinated, Problem Solvers, Empathizers and Avoiders (Kashdan et al., 2018).  The notion of types of curious people, and curiosity as a trait, lends itself to the idea that curiosity can be learned, or nurtured (Peterson, 2020). Furthermore, the five curiosity dimensions demonstrate the varied range of behaviours that may be considered curious.

Curiosity, Art and the Environment

How might an interest in curiosity lend itself to an exploration of earthworms – artistic or ecological – in the North West of England? The relationship between curiosity and art has been explored through investigations of correlations between curiosity and creativity, with suggestion that they may be linked through personality traits, such as Openness to Experience (Kenett et al., 2023), or through observed similarities in neural responses to novelty seeking (Ivancovsky et al., 2024). Barbieri and colleagues suggest aesthetic appreciation may act as a ‘valve’, prompting people to experience novelty as an opportunity to acquire knowledge rather than as a risk or threat (Barbieri et al., 2024). There is suggestion, then, that more creative people may also be more prone to curiosity (and vice versa), and that aesthetic experiences may instil a state of curiosity in audiences invited to explore, interpret and respond to the novel stimuli they see and feel.

If creative or aesthetic experiences can engender curiosity, they could also be a gateway to encourage exploration of themes or subjects artists draw from to create their work. Earthworms as a subject could concern the climate and ecological crisis, through the important role worms play in maintaining the richness and fertility of soil, and how human impact has a negative effect on this. More people than not in the UK worry about climate change, with those experiencing climate concern or anxiety more likely to take action or seek information (ONS, 2021; Whitmarsh et al., 2022). Yet, in some cases, people may experience an ‘ostrich effect’, less likely to be motivated to seek information about things they don’t like to think about (Golman & Loewenstein, 2013). If aesthetic experiences can, indeed, act as a valve to encourage curiosity rather than anxiety when presented with new information (Barbieri et al., 2024), perhaps art can be a way of encouraging exploration of things that are difficult to process, stimulating learning, further information seeking and action?

The circle, a whole, a sun, a meeting

A group of academics and professionals, with expertise in areas from soil to ornithology, from palaeolithic painting to agriculture, enter a dark room, dimly lit by battery-powered candles around its periphery. Large, strange shapes emerge from the gloom, acuminating upwards in a curve. Beams of light from two torches slice through the gathering, casting undulating shadows high on the walls above us. A voice reverberates around us, met in harmony with a dawn chorus as a rising sun creeps up between the vermicular forms. Now bathed in light, we notice detail: a ring of ash, a fur-lined nest, the sharp sounds of machines – or are they starlings? 

We have been invited to experience The circle, a whole, a sun, a meeting, an immersive art installation and interactive workshop led by artist Elizabeth Clough. The sculptural forms, placed in a circle, are made from rings of cardboard packaging. They are at once ear trumpets, inviting us to listen to the earth, and earthworms, bursting through the soil. While we are encouraged to subjectively interpret the work in our own way, we are also invited to think about our relationship with the soil and how it was cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors. How our lives have always been soundtracked by birdsong though that is less true now than ever before. How birds and their sounds, or lack of them, are often portents of impending doom (the canary in the coalmine). 

Clough facilitates a workshop. Participants are first asked to orientate themselves in the space, working out which way is north without the help of window. We realise the projected sun was, indeed, rising in the East. We then create a map on the floor around the sculptures, using pens, tape and ash to mark out landmarks, coastline, rivers, roads and our hometowns or significant locations. Finally, we are offered an array of materials: ochre, soil, charcoal, aluminium, painted casts of too-large fruit, birds’ eggs lined with fur. We each choose an object and share a little about why we picked it, how it resonates with our work and lives in some way. An archaeologist picks a piece of charcoal, explaining its importance in carbon dating Palaeolithic art on cave walls. A farmer demonstrated how the colouring of a clod of earth indicates the healthiness of the soil. People choosing shiny, too-large casts of strawberries and apples talk about the tension between the expectation of being able to buy perfect fruit from supermarkets at any time of year and the knowledge of the damage this must be doing to the earth. 

Conversation touches on the beauty of birdsong, and how it feels like we hear it much less now than in the past. The sounds in Clough’s piece, she tells us, are a combination of her voice, children mimicking birdsong, and starlings mimicking human machines. We talk about the hypocrisies in people’s love of nature: how people who care about animals will spray pets with pesticides to kill fleas, which then become part of birds’ nests, killing their chicks. We discuss how farmers’ relationship with the soil is increasingly dictated by supermarkets’ demands for produce that is beyond perfect: bigger, shinier, uniform. This leads to methods which, over time, destroys the soil, and the ecosystems it holds.  

Darwin’s observations of worms included one of the first recorded studies of bioturbation, how worms naturally benefit the soil through burrowing, eating, and excreting, adding nutrients and aeration. Clough tells us about a conversation she had with a farmer, who told her that agricultural machinery can compact soil to the extent that it suffocates the worms beneath. They struggle to the surface, piercing the topsoil. Exposed, they are picked off by opportunistic birds. There can be over a million worms in an acre of soil. We, the participants, have been offered the opportunity to burrow through this artwork, from seeing the sun rise over it to feeling the materials it is made from. The experience has been haptic and aural as well as aesthetic. The discussion Clough has facilitated has woven together themes of ecology, history, geography, agriculture, heritage, food, anthropology and ideas about the future. Those present drew connections with their own work, passions and worries, just as the researchers at Grange-over-Sands in 1981 celebrating the centenary of the publication of Darwin’s work on worms may have been inspired by their curiosities. 

Questions of curiosity

How does a multi-sensory, immersive, interactive art experience make people curious? What does it make them curious about? And how does this relate to what they do outside of that experience?  At the end of the workshop, fuelled by our curiosity as researchers, we asked participants to write answers to three questions:

1. What is curiosity to you?

2. What made you feel curious during this workshop?

3. How might you use this in your work?

These three questions relate to the what, when and how of curiosity: what are people’s subjective definitions of curiosity? When do they experience it? And how does it relate to what they do in their everyday lives? 

13 participants from the first workshop (academics, professionals in related fields) and 4 from the second (Fine Art undergraduate students) returned anonymous completed responses. 

How do people define curiosity?

Participants’ responses most (12/17, 71%) mentioned questioning, or reducing uncertainty. One response described “an openness to enter into what you don’t know or understand” while another drew on humans’ “capacity to explore the known and the unknown”. Questioning was described as an “act” that is “constant, something you are always doing”; a “feeling / mind wanting more”; and as something you have, motivating “the need to explore”. This aligns with deprivation or information gap theory of curiosity (Loewenstein, 1994), relating explorative or information-seeking behaviour they experience as intrinsically driven, or innate to human experience.

Other common responses included those associating curiosity with learning, understanding, or exploration (8/17, 47%). Some saw curiosity as “the desire to know and understand something” or “our species’ natural desire to understand the world around it”. Others considered how curiosity was something that can be learned, for example how their parents “speculated about how and why things are the way they are, collected things like interesting pebbles in a jar of water, and taught me words like umbelliferous”, which led to greater curiosity about the world. There was also the idea that curiosity is something most intensely experienced in childhood but is “harder to do as an adult”. Framing curiosity as something that develops over time, and may be more intensely experienced in childhood, resonates with developmental research into curiosity in children (Jirout, Evans & Son, 2024; Peterson, 2020).

Feelings associated with curiosity were touched on by seven respondents (41%). Some mentioned experiencing wonder or intrigue: “to chase the feeling of wonder” or to “open that can of worms”. Others described the feelings of pleasure or desire associated with curiosity: “a spark of interest, something that causes a pause of consideration, often accompanied by an inner pleasure”. These descriptions of curiosity as pleasurable are similar to learning progress theories (Murayama et al., 2019; Oudeyer, Gottlieb & Lopes, 2016; Poli et al., 2024), which propose curiosity is motivated by positive feelings associated with learning something new. The curiosity then drives further exploration and learning, leading to a positively reinforcing cycle. This is supported by neuroscientific research demonstrating how curiosity stimulates the brain’s reward system (Kidd & Hayden, 2015).

There was also mention of who experiences curiosity. Four mentioned that it is part of what it means to be human, or “what keeps humans evolving”. Two mentioned non-humans, either in terms of “imagining/wondering/from different perspectives considering e.g. what is it like to be a worm/plant/bird?” Or considering how non-humans can also experience curiosity, “curiosity is one of my favourite aspects of humanity & other creatures”. Research has found that worms, too, demonstrate curious behaviours. A study of the roundworm, C.elegans found they showed sophisticated exploration and information-seeking strategies in searching for food, simulating elements of what has been outlined above for human curiosity (Calhoun et al., 2014; Kidd & Hayden, 2015). 

Overall, curiosity was considered as a positive experience that drives learning and understanding of the self, other perspectives and the world. As one participant put it, “curiosity is the urge to add flavour into our lives.”

When do people experience curiosity?

Participants were asked what made them feel curious in relation to the workshop. Nine (53%) mentioned the sculptural forms. In some cases, this rereferred to specific shapes, such as the “worm-like figures”, or the “shapes of the roots/worms”. In others, the ambiguity of the shapes generated curiosity: “the shapes were very unfamiliar”. Other aesthetic or sensory elements that sparked curiosity included the sounds, light, shadows, and objects used in the workshop, “where does the aluminium come from and what did it look like as rock?”

Some focused on interpreting the meaning of the sculptures. In some cases, this related to uncertainty: “the ambiguity of how one might interpret the immersive experience elicited my curiosity”. Or, how, “the use of metaphor as a way in, including sculptural forms, sound, things overlaying with other things, filters onto what's familiar”. One focused on the multiplicity of meaning, “the multiple ways each part can be interpreted, how the piece changes its meaning with each perspective you can place on it”. There is a relationship here with wonder, which has been conceptualised as emotional, or even existential response to uncertainty (Schinkel, 2017). 

In some responses, curiosity about, or experienced by, other people, or about the self, were mentioned. One wrote, “I felt curious as well how people feel how different objects represent things/themselves”, while another asked, “How do people remember the shape of a river and draw it on the floor in sand?” Another focused on connections between people and the artwork, “the relationships between the forms and myself and the other participants/entities/objects.” The multidimensional model of curiosity presented by Kashdan and colleagues (Kashdan et al., 2018) includes Social Curiosity, an interest in and about other people, which these comments capture. Others have suggested the importance of social information in shaping one’s curiosity, and how what we are curious about is often influenced by other people (Dubey, Mehta & Lombrozo, 2021). These participants’ curiosity may have been influenced by the collective experience of engaging with Clough’s installation, which also involved interaction between participants, rather than a passive viewing of an artwork.  

Four participants mentioned nature in their responses. This included thinking more about “the world below”, or wondering, “what it would feel like to be a worm or other animal, in-tune with the cycles of nature”. One stated this curiosity made them want to take action and “want to get outside and reconnect with nature.” The themes of the work being related to ecological issues was drawn out through the activities led by Clough as well as interpretations of the sculptural installation. A question remains as to whether a more passive viewing of the work would have led to equivalent curiosity about its wider themes. 

One participant argued that what they experienced was not curiosity as such: “I'm not sure about the word curious. I felt playful in the map making. I enjoyed the imaginative process of bringing lived experience and imagination together.” Although they were “curious about what people from other disciplines thought.” This is perhaps justification for a multidimensional framing of curiosity and an acknowledgement that individual definitions of curiosity may vary. 

How might curiosity be useful?

In relation to how participants might use what they had gleaned from the workshop and the curiosity they experience, many described how curiosity propels the work they do: “curiosity drives research questions and actions all the time,” or, “it drives my work to indulge in the things I am interested in.” Others mentioned specific actions they will begin to look at differently, “when I'm working outdoors, coppicing, digging in the mud - I'll be more aware of what's in my hands - the microbes, the bacteria, the soil.” This also applied to future actions, “What will happen if I collect all my milk bottle tops? How can I use similar techniques to run a workshop I'm planning?”

Others specified stimulating curiosity in others through one’s work. For example, through teaching, where they may can be “encouraging different thought processes and celebrating diverse thinking.” One mentioned how, when working with school groups, it was “vital we get them curious in nature and the land so they are invested in it.” Communication was also mentioned as a way to invite curiosity, to “create a deeper experience & understanding with our visitors, hopefully creating a deeper connection with our work,” or to “maximise the impact of my research”. Research has shown the importance of epistemic curiosity as a motivator for learning (Post and van der Molen, 2018) and that teachers can support students to be more curious (Peterson, 2020). An interesting question is additionally raised in these responses suggesting the importance of teachers’ own curiosity in sharing the passion they have about the subjects they share. 

The relationship between curiosity and art was explicitly drawn out in some answers. Art was seen to invigorate curiosity in others and oneself. Working with artists and creating art can “make science understandable and exciting. It's also encouraged my own curiosity again!” One mentioned the importance of “inviting difference with greater confidence” and how artists are “able to do this, beyond creating things.” Some of the art students also related this to their artistic practice, “I am blessed in life to find myself in curious situations which is reflected in my art”. The connection between creativity and curiosity has been highlighted in a range of research (e.g. Kenett et al., 2023; Ivancovsky et al., 2024), and these responses suggest for participants both doing creative things, like making art, or engaging with creative experiences, through working with artists, are a way to drive their own curiosity and inspire it in others. 

What do other people think

Driven by our own interest in seeking wider responses to similar questions, we collaborated with a Lancaster-based youth organisation, Escape2Make, who shared two questions with the 11-18-year-old young people they work with. Five responses were shared anonymously. The questions were:

1. What is curiosity to you?

2. What makes you feel curious?

Three responses interpreted curiosity as learning or understanding, “learning about things that I've not learnt,” “finding things out”, or “wondering what something is”. Another described this more as epistemic emotions, “intriguement, wonder”. A final response focused on specific actions, the “desire to try new things, meet new people and set new goals”. From a developmental perspective, it is interesting that the common themes from young people’s definitions of curiosity were not dissimilar to those from adults, with curiosity generally seen as positive and connected to learning new information. Their mention of wonder recalls research suggesting an interrelationship between creativity, curiosity and wonder (Bazhydai & Westermann, 2020).

One respondent was curious about “everything”. Others mentioned people, art, or the world, for example, “people's brains, thought process and language” or “seeing things that don’t have an ending”. One was very specific, stating only “LEGO!” While these responses were not related to an artwork, there are interesting lines of connection between curiosity about people, ambiguity, art and creative activities. Greater involvement from young people, who here provided a small number of insightful definitions of curiosity, would also contribute to an understanding of curiosity in adolescence, asking questions of an education system that may not value curiosity as much as many feel it should (Jirout, Evans & Son, 2024; Peterson, 2020; Post & van der Molen, 2018).   

Discussion: does art make people curious?

This exploration of curiosity in relation to the experience of an immersive artwork is meant, primarily, as a playful line of connection as to where Elizabeth Clough’s installation sits within wider academic inquiry into curiosity. We made the decision to ask questions relatively informally, gathering responses only from the select group invited to participate in Clough’s workshops and a small group of local young people. The implicit bias in answers collected from this sample, alongside the decision to not use objective tasks or validated scales to gather data, means we cannot draw any solid conclusions here. However, with that in mind, in this final section we propose a few points of interest that emerged from the responses we collected and outlined above, and how they might relate to a consideration of a relationship between curiosity, aesthetic experience and exploration of wider themes, such as the climate crisis.

The experience of the artwork led to curiosity about both the artwork itself (how it is made, what it signifies) and about the wider themes it connects to. Participants said they were curious about the forms, the sensory elements of the installation, the materials used. In some cases, this was specific curiosity: they wanted to know what the forms were made from and what they represent. In other cases, it felt more explorative, with curiosity directed towards the ambiguity, unfamiliarity, or multiplicity of meaning. In this way, this experience of an artwork can stimulate responses that could be seen to fit across the specific-diversive curiosity axis (Berlyne, 1954a), or that perhaps combines elements of the Joyous Exploration and Deprivation Sensitivity dimensions of curiosity posited in Kashdan and colleagues’ five-dimensional model (Kashdan et al., 2018). 

We could argue, then, that the feedback gathered from this workshop suggests art can make people curious in a variety of ways: it encourages exploration, triggering specific information-seeking while simultaneously accommodating a certain enjoyment of ambiguity. There is also some suggestion from responses that this curiosity can, in some cases, be directed towards particular themes. In this case, the emerging story of ecological disaster revealed through the steps of the workshop (worms suffocating in compacted soil, supermarket demand leading to damaging monocultures, chicks killed by pesticide-soaked dog hair) appeared in many examples of responses related both to when participants experienced curiosity and how it relates to their work. Following Barbieri and colleagues’ research into how art can act as a valve to mediate experiences of novelty between curiosity and anxiety (Barbieri et al., 2024), one could argue that engaging with this artwork opened possibilities to engage positively with the potentially anxiety-inducing topic of the climate crisis.   

Further investigation could pursue this line of inquiry, also considering the difference between aesthetic experiences as a passive observer and as an active participant in an immersive art workshop related to an installation. Research has explored the emotional outcomes of looking at art, including in different experiential contexts (Miller et al., 2025; Rodriguez et al., 2024.) A more in-depth consideration of the difference between being a participant or a viewer, or an experience like Clough’s work which intentionally blurs the two, and how that may lead to different types of curiosity would be a valuable contribution to the field. Furthermore, following up on findings that artists and scientists show proclivity for curiosity (Birenbaum et al., 2024), interrogation of who participants are may lead to interesting conclusions about how curiosity relates to different professions. 

Conclusion

Did you know:

• Earthworms have five hearts, all situated near to their head.

• There are approximately 2,700 types of earthworm.

• Some varieties of earthworm can group up to three metres long. 

• Earthworms are hermaphrodites, they have male and female reproductive organs.

• Earthworms breathe through their skin.

What connects an immersive artwork, human ecology, curiosity research and earthworms? This piece of writing has explored this question, intending to be neither an academic study nor an interpretation of an artwork. It offers a reflection on how this particular artwork might make people feel curious, and how that curiosity might relate to the world around them. It asks a group of people who experienced the artwork to offer their ideas about curiosity, when they feel it, and how it connects with their work. 

Darwin wrote of worms that, “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organised creatures” (Darwin, 1881). His curiosity about worms inspired 40 years of experiments and observations. This, in turn, encouraged over 140 researchers to gather from across the world to discuss Darwin and worms a century later. Elizabeth Clough was driven by her curiosity about earthworms and concerns about how they are affected by humans to create a series of sculptures and immersive experience. A group of people who came to experience this artwork told us how the forms, content and meaning of the work provoked their curiosity, and how curiosity is in turn woven through the work they do in different fields. My involvement in this piece led to me discovering facts about earthworms, unearthing the connection to the Grange-over-Sands gathering and Darwin’s obsession. 

There are hints, from this workshop and the responses of participants, of an intriguing interrelationship between an immersive aesthetic experience and a range of experiences of curiosity. There is also a suggestion that experiences of art, such as this, could encourage exploration of challenging topics, such as the ecological crisis. Further investigation could pursue these connections, unearthing the rich potential of multisensory, interactive, experiential art as stimuli in developing an understanding of curiosity.  

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