The Scottish Touring Exhibitions Consortium is to be congratulated for organising another strong show. Interface brings together the work of nine contemporary artists from around the UK, all of them involved in projects combining science and art.

The show started its national tour at Gracefield Arts Centre in Dumfries and is currently at the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock, East Ayrshire. The institute was purpose built in 1901 as a library, museum and gallery and the main exhibition hall provides a fine venue for this show of prints, paintings, sculpture, sets and video films inspired by science.

Hazel McLaren, the visual arts officer for East Ayrshire Council, who is based at the institute, says: “Many of the artists have had early career experiences in scientific fields, others have been involved in collaborations with scientists or residencies based within a scientific environment. As the Interface catalogue points out, artists’ interest in science is a long established tradition, from Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th century to Damien Hirst in the 20th.”

Alastair Mack worked as a laboratory technician for 12 years before embarking on a degree course at the Edinburgh College of Art. In this exhibition, he shows eight highly stylised prints that combine intense areas of colour with scientific symbols and mathematical formulae.

Sculptor Hideo Furuta was born in Japan, where he studied maths and physics as well as art, but has lived in Britain since 1985. His piece is 16 identical squares of steel laid out on the floor with pieces of identical steel chain placed diagonally across each square and a brightly coloured ping-pong ball placed randomly beside each chain.

Elaine Bennet trained as a scientist before taking up art. Her work is a long dining table laid with a cloth and 27 sets of bone china forks and knives (apparently representing X and Y chromosomes) which are so fragile that very few remain whole.

Mich le Lazenby is showing various digital representations of the human body and nature.

Liz Douglas’s pale landscape paintings feature areas of pattern based on seed and pollen particles viewed via microscopes.

In a large textured painting by Anna Dumitriu, a single human cell seems to be disintegrating around the edges and merging into its surrounding background.

There is a series of meticulously worked canvases by Harriet McDougall, whose tiny brush marks, creating a vibration effect, are based on notes of the long, complex song of the sedge warbler.

Two video pieces are included in the show: one by Clara Ursitti focuses in good humoured fashion, on our often under-appreciated sense of smell and the other - not for the squeamish - by Louise Wilson on doctors and their responses to work.

Dawn Henderby, curator of the exhibition, says: “Interface gives pupils a chance to see that art isn’t just concerned with representation and shows how artists today are dealing with new ideas in science and technology and how they push those ideas forward.”