Observe Closely

 

A collaboration between Caroline Parkin (Research Fellow, MRC Centre for Developmental and Biomedical Genetics, The University of Sheffield)
& Rachael Hand (artist, studying the BA in Creative Art Practice, Sheffield Hallam University)

Having originally trained as a doctor, Rachael Hand is currently studying for a BA in Creative Art Practice at Sheffield Hallam University. Having initially experienced a culture shock on entering the art world, she is now interested in exploring the similarities as well as the differences in the ways artists & scientists work, and the ways in which art and science construct how we see the world. The last 50 years in particular have presented us with images such as the Earth from space, that quite literally change our perspective. The digital era also presents us with huge amounts of 'virtual' visual information about things we could never see directly with our own eyes.
 
With these issues in mind, Rachael approached Caroline Parkin suggesting a collaboration, of which Observe Closely is the first finished piece to emerge.

  The image on the left is an intaglio print. In intaglio printing, ink is worked into grooves in a metal plate, and the rest of the plate wiped clean. Paper is dampened, the plate placed onto it, and the paper forced into the grooves of the plate by rolling them together in a printing press. A well known example of intaglio prints would be the copperplates illustrating Robert Hooke's 'Micrographia' of 1665.

The image on the right was captured using a laser scanning confocal microscope. These use laser beams passed through pinhole apertures to produce an extremely focused beam of light, and to exclude light from layers in the sample which are shallower or deeper than the one being focused on.This allows a digital 'slice' to be taken through a living organism without harming it, with a result analogous to that of an MRI scanner, but on a much smaller scale.

The image shows the head of a 5 day old zebrafish embryo, in which two types of muscle have been labelled with with different coloured fluorescent proteins.Zebrafish embryos are used because they are transparent. This, together with the fluorescent 'tagging', allows pictures to be taken of living fish, without using invasive procedures or complex staining methods.

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