microscopic crafts

A Saturday shopping adventure in Melbourne with my friend Mimi brought us to a cabinet of medical curiosities, tucked away in the magical Nicholas Building. Anno Domni Home is filled with sculptures which celebrate the beauty in the macabre. My favourite, some petri dishes of micro-organisms, made from hospital blankets.

There are also embroideries, felted body parts and other stitched objects which will fascinate anyone with a medical or scientific interest. Considering that Mimi and I bonded in medical school over dissection classes, sewing and imagining microbiology lecture slides as fabric patterns, it is no wonder that our wanderings brought us to this crafty cave. Watch out for an exhibition next year by this clever artist.

Image from Anno Domini Home blog, used with kind permission of Andrew Delaney.

embroidering anthropology

What is not to love about the gorgeous embroidered typography of this month's edition of the new online anthropology journal, Anthropology of This Century:

It is so nice when academia pays some attention to aesthetics.

further experiments in micoscopic embroidery

First image my own and second of moss male gametophyte from basic biological slides.

stitching seed cells

Following a previous post about Anna Dumitriu's experiments in bacterial communication, I thought I would share the embroidery I finished last year, inspired by Annie's postcard of seed cells. More about pneumatic tubes next week I promise!

experiments in bacterial communication

Another post not strictly about pneumatic transportation, but on a topic that is closely (or perhaps more tangentially) related if we think of the ways in which pathological samples are networked around a hospital as a form of communication.

This is a piece of embroidery by Anna Dumitriu. Anna is interested in the borderlines between art and science, such as this example of bacterial communication, tracing the movement of bacterial cells on pieces of linen and lace. She is the director of the Institute of Unnecessary Research and is an artist in residence on the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at Oxford University. Her exhibition of these exquisite embroideries opened on Saturday at R-Space, in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. The exhibition also includes other microbiological crafts such as:

"A large-scale collaborative crochet based on the bacteria from the artist’s own bed, an indigo blue coloured patchwork stained with MRSA bacteria grown on chromogenic agar and patterned with clinical antibiotics and other tools in the research and treatment of this disease, [and] a Whitework embroidered lab coat patterned with images of bacteria and moulds found on it"

Despite my interest in science, medicine, art and craft, I have not always been a fan of bioart, finding many works disengaging. This exhibition caught my eye however, not only for its melding of embroidery and microbiology (see my fascination with this in a previous post here and here), but also because of the beauty of each piece, and the curiosity the artist invokes in the viewer.

If you miss the exhibition you can always settle for the catalogue, available from Blurb.

Images from The Normal Flora Project.

seed cells

This card arrived by post several weeks ago from my friend Annie. They are the seeds of small Australian plants and Annie likened them the seed cells of humans, microbes, that I had embroidered onto napkins recently. Her paper post gave me the idea to continue embroidering molecular representations of human life onto cloth, as part of an ongoing exploration of the relationship between new medical technologies and old, between the digital and the stitched.

pandemic!

On the weekend I played Pandemic with Thomas and friends Ros and Jarrod. The timing could not have been better as I finish a draft of my report today for a larger project looking at the 'biosociality' of influenza pandemics. The game was fantastic. The virus spread in little coloured blocks all over the board, between cities, as we worked together, Medic, Scientist, Operations Expert and Researcher, to find cures for the disease. As we didn't actually eradicate the virus, it would have been more appropriate if we were finding vaccines, but small detail aside, the game was tense and exciting. Apparently new updates for the game include little petri dishes to store the virus! The game is out of stock at the moment, but as soon as it is reprinted in May/June, I'm ordering one ...


Image of green algae that I embroidered onto a napkin.