Making macro from micro

It's Saturday morning in downtown Manhattan, and I'm looking at an enormous smallpox virus. A perfect beginning to a science fiction movie, but not quite so dramatic in real life. The specimen, projected on a wall, is a sculpture made up of yarn and canvas, and mixed media artist Laura Splan is explaining why she used materials that people often associate with comfort and home to depict one of the world's deadliest killers.

"I try to create a fluctuation in perception between comfort and discomfort, beauty and horror, attraction and repulsion," says Splan.Even the audience is a "mixed media" of sorts, filled with an unlikely combination of artists and researchers. But we've come together on a spring day to The New York Academy of Sciences to see biological objects under a different light. From an artist's light, actually.This session's theme is microbes, and Splan is showing pieces that make up a series called "Vigilant." Like "smallpox," the other pieces are hand latch-hooked circular canvas wall sculptures, all approximately 3x5 meters, depicting colorful, almost childish renderings of deadly microorganisms. By combining these disparate elements, Splan creates a tension between the sweetness of the domestic craft and the anxiety such dangerous agents evoke. The title is a play on the anthrax scares of 2002. In another piece, "Doilies," Splan creates smaller embroideries of thread on velvet to display the beautifully symmetrical ultrastructure of viruses. Every virus component is there in a simplified form: the genetic material, the core proteins, the lipid membrane. "On one hand, you can see each piece as a doily, an object that was used to decorate, to protect, to conceal. On the other hand, you can see it as a viral structure, so that the doily itself becomes a sort of camouflage for a more disturbing image that's in it," explains Splan. She relies on scientific books and a background in biology to ensure each drawing is relatively accurate.

"As an artist, I use biomedical imagery as a point of departure to explore our ambivalence towards the human body," says Splan. "I'm interested in how this ambivalence is informed by social and cultural influences." In "Thought Patterns," Splan used her own blood to paint a series of ethereal brain structures such as neuronal networks, which bring to mind the drawings of 19th century histologist and Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal. "When people found out it was blood they started to ask questions: how I drew the blood, did it hurt?," recalls Splan. Because the images come from her body, her blood (drawn from her fingertips using ultrafine needles such as those used to inject insulin), the structures of cells became visual metaphors for the fragility and the complexity of the body. The images also explore the sensation of pain, Splan explains, adding that obtaining blood didn't hurt, and she only took small amounts that she sometimes diluted with water.

Jonathan King from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who stands up with Splan to talk about microbial structures, says presenting biological entities in a non-scientific context enables Splan and other artists to explore ideas without the burden of airtight accuracy. "I look at the knitting of the adenovirus and I immediately see the proteins, the penton, the hexon. I have more points of connection with this art than somebody who doesn't know what a virus looks like."But there's more to the images than the science, King adds. "When an image is presented as art, the whole experience is different," he says. "Art is trying to speak to your sensibility."Graciela Flores mail@the-scientist.comImages: Smallpox, Doily (HIV), Thought Patterns. All images taken by Laura Splan. Links within this articleLaura Splan http://www.laurasplan.comK. Weir, "Biotechnology on display," The Scientist, March 9, 2007. http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/52933/Biology and Art: Two Worlds or One? http://www.nyas.org/events/eventDetail.asp?eventID=8884\Santiago Ramón y Cajal 'http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1906/cajal-bio.htmlJonathan King http://web.mit.edu/biology/www/facultyareas/facresearch/king.htmlP. Hunter, "Protein folding: Theory meets disease," The Scientist, September 8, 2003. http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/14060