Background to the project:

"I arrived at the RCA as a ceramicist. I had spent the previous 2 years turning solid lumps of clay into white liquid ‘slip’. I didn’t realise at the time it was the solidity of the clay I didn't like. I painted the white slip in thin layers onto cardboard boxes and fired them, almost expecting them not to survive. Sometimes they did, but not for long. If a photograph was clay, they would be clay photographs. The RCA had a hot glass furnace and I rejected the clay altogether. It wasn’t the finished glass objects that drew me in, but the overlooked journey to get to the object; the heat, the colour, the fluidity and the performance and decisions of the makers.

What interested me most about my Antarctic residency was the space between the environment and the people living in it. It was difficult to exist on a mental and physical level, and I made work that reflected that. Antarctica intensified my awareness of mark making, and made me reject the notion of 'making objects' even more than before. When I returned home I created a project that was based on film and photography, but I needed to use a light that was less ‘solid’, I wanted the very source of my images to be more precarious, less controllable.

Working with microbiologist Simon Park and Caterina Albano, I used bacterial bioluminescence, a living organism, to create a series of photographs, film and installations. The bacteria died over the course of my portraits, it became even harder to capture the photographs of naked skin, and that is how I wanted it to be. They nearly don’t exist."

This project is called 'Exploring the Invisible' it has been made possible by the support of the Wellcome Trust and is one of the projects included in ‘Bio Design – Nature, Science, Creativity’, Edited and text by William Myers. foreword by Paola Antonelli, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Published by Thames and Hudson.

Sketch of photograph booth

February 3, 2009

Sketch of ‘Photograph booth’ lit by 10litres of Photobacterium phosphoreum

Harvard bridge measures 364.4 smoots and 1 ear

February 3, 2009

A major influence on my work, including ‘Exploring the Invisible’ has been ‘Smoot’s Ear - the measure of humanity’ by Robert Tavernor, Professor of architecture and urban design and director of the Cities programe, London School of Economics.

In his book Tavernor urges us to look beyond the notion that measuring is strictly a scientific activity, divorced from human concerns. Instead, he sets measures and measuring in cultural context and shows how deeply they are connected to human experience and history.

Is the measurement of the importance of the bioluminescent bacteria only seen in quantifiable medical advancements, or is there also an important value in engaging with the bacterial light out side of a less scientific context?

Glowing Corpses

January 28, 2009

One of the very first practical demonstrations of the role of micro-organisms was undertaken in 1825, in a macabre experiment on the eerie light emitted by two discarded bodies in a London anatomy school. The luminous material was scraped off and was then used to make other corpses glow.

Bioluminescence

January 23, 2009

Tagging a gene with bioluminescent material is being used extensively in biological research, its one of the easiest ways to track genetic signals and pathways in living cells. By engineering the light emitting genes into bacteria , it has been possible to follow the progress of bacterial infections, and to detect bacterial pathogens..

Bioluminescence is being used in the visualization of gene expression, in the non invasive analysis of cancer cells, and is also being used in current research in the fight against AIDS - although the small size of viruses makes gene insertion more difficult, studies have been initiated to attempt to track the progression of the AIDS virus by changing the cells of the animal to glow when a virus invades.

'Exploring The Invisible' Blog 2009 - 2011

Background to the project:

Project Blog below: