Working, working, working

It’s been a long while since I last posted – which is not to say that I haven’t been busy moving forward with the project, just that I’ve been focused on the studio rather than the laptop! So this and future posts will start to bring things up to date, slowly but surely, to the point where I am at present, with all the glass elements made and about to start construction of the piece in earnest.

The first major landmark since the last post was bringing the team up to speed in May with the way I wanted to go with the composition of the piece. Having settled on the idea of a natural history vitrine, I took them through my initial ideas for a diorama based around the developing perforation of a series of vesicles by the peptide.

I felt somewhat hampered by the necessity to have the conversation by Zoom rather than being able to talk in person and bounce about ideas and look at samples; we had initially imagined that I would go back to visit them in Leeds during May, but as lockdown was still very much in place, that was not an option. So Zoom it was.

I constructed a brief presentation to take Paul, Andrew and Arindam through my thinking and to show them some of the samples that I had been making. It culminated in a rough and ready construction collage of the basic elements of what I was proposing. Here are the slides from the presentation to give you a sense of what I was thinking. There’s no text, so it’s not totally self-explanatory, but it does give a sense of the elements that were coming together in my thinking in May.

We had some great chat as a result of talking through my ideas which have led to more concrete developments. Arindam uploaded some images for me from his research process – some spheroid experiments and some cell images – which i am working on to be a backdrop to the piece. Andrew has provided me with some more of his handwritten calculations, which I want to collage into the backdrop and possibly use in other ways.

In terms of my glasswork, we had some productive thoughts about my ‘Z stack’ element (my very rough prototype is in the image at the top of this post) – which I shall post about separately. We also talked about a potential ‘wasp nest’ element, but agreed that the emphasis needed to be on the science/ research rather than wasps. By the end of the conversation I felt things had definitely moved phase from ‘what am i making’ to ‘how will i make it’. So I went on from there to making vesicles – more of that to come soon!