Tag: wings

Things with wings

When thinking about all the metaphors and how my artwork might develop I was immediately struck by the metaphor of cancer cells developing ‘wings’ as they transition from single tumours to metastatic disease. I knew it would be technically challenging making a piece in glass that reflected to any degree what I was visualising in my mind’s eye, but I thought I should try and at least capture something of the feeling by ‘going for it’ and seeing what I could achieve.

To understand the challenge, it’s necessary to share a little about how glass behaves when it’s heated. To make my pieces in ‘pate de verre’ (literally paste of glass), i make a paste from crushed glass or glass powder and apply it to a mould. This is the process you can track looking at my previous post about making ‘cells’. When the glass is then heated in a kiln, the powder or crushed glass fuses together in the heat to make a single surface. What holds it in position is a delicate balance between the level of heat and the structure of the mould. Too much heat and it will drop off the mould, too little and it won’t fuse and will return to dust.

When trying to create ‘wings’, if they are freestanding, they will sag in the heat and eventually drop onto the nearest surface, which might be the body of the cell or might be the shelf of the kiln. Luckily, earlier in the year I had learned a firing technique of firing pieces in a bowl of powder (sand or aluminium oxide) which could support the wings while the glass fused. For this i am grateful to the amazing glass artist Saman Kalantari. Here an image of some pieces I created by combining this firing technique with my own method of pate de verre.

However, what I wanted to achieve with this project was more ambitious technically in terms of the scale and form of the wings in relation to the ‘body’. My initial sketch for the piece is below.

As I’m not super comfortable in two dimensions I went on to make a 3D maquette out of polystyrene and wire mesh. You can follow the whole process through the flow chart below…

THe chart makes it look relatively straightforward, but I can reveal that it was not! Getting the firing right required multiple attempts, with the piece going into the kiln in one way or another about 5 times. Luckily, I wanted the piece to look a bit ‘distressed’ as this is entirely in keeping with the ideas of the cells that emerge with ‘with wings’ from the ‘cell graveyard’ within a tumour. The cell that emerged was a bit battered from all it had been through, but proved that it is possible to make a double-winged entity where the wings have a significant area in relation to the size of the ‘body’ of the piece.

Here is an image of the piece once I had brushed it off and done a bit of coldworking - that is, finishing edges and surfaces with grinding and polishing tools.

Metaphors and concepts (6)

This, my final post in the mini-series about the concepts and metaphors that I’ve drawn from my initial research conversations, deals with metaphors at their most metaphorical. These particular examples are not part of the standard scientific way of talking about something. Signalling or pathways, for example, are no longer really seen as particularly metaphorical but are part of the standard scientific language, even though when you stop to look they are clearly metaphorical in origin. The examples here, however, are drawn from more distant ideas to try to express something which otherwise seems out of reach. This can be especially true when trying to convey some concepts to those (like me) who don’t specialise in this area of science.

“Cell graveyard“

In the hypoxic conditions in the middle of a dense tumour, the majority of cancer cells will die, leaving alive only those with TP53 (or similar) mutations which allow them to continue to survive and multiply. The centre of the tumour is therefore akin to a mass grave for those cells which are not destined to become truly intransigent.

“Launchpad / lift off“

The point at which a cell can emerge from the tumour, going through a process called EMT that allows them to move more freely and spread around the body. This launchpad signals the beginnings of metastasis, beyond which most cancers become a very different proposition for treatment.

“Wings“

The metaphorical effect of passing through the bottleneck of hypoxia and the cell graveyard is to gain wings and achieve lift off.

“Black Swan“

A cancer cell that has achieved wings and lift off….

How does all this relate to the London Cancer Hub?

These ideas are incredibly evocative and loaded with emotional as well as conceptual content. As such. they were ideas that i was immediately drawn to explore. and indeed my first thought in the studio was to start creating a winged object. That may have been in part because I have recently discovered a way to make winged object using a new technique and so it’s rat the top of my mind, but also because there is something very poignant about the idea that something gaining wings and lifting off could have such a devastating impact on the prognosis of someone’s disease.

So how does that relate to the LCH? I am drawn to thinking of both a black swan and a white swan. With cancer, the appearance of a black swan is the point at which the disease very likely becomes unstoppable for a particular individual. I like to think, romantically perhaps, that an equivalent white swan can emerge that will make the combined strength of all the players at the London Cancer Hub unstoppable in the future in their effort to prevent and treat cancer. Despite the prevalence of cancer, one of the many things I have learned over the last few months is the level of the selective and adaptive forces required to create the ‘wings’ in a cancer that make it indestructible. I imagine the effort, resources and energy required to create a white swan will be similarly significant.