Artist & Researcher 3:
The making of Alveolar Alchemy, cotton embroidery on embossed cloth, 14 x 14 x 1.5 inches.
The making of Alveolar Alchemy, cotton embroidery on embossed cloth, 14 x 14 x 1.5 inches.
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In the Artist & Researcher art series at the USC Keck School of Medicine, curator Ted Meyer pairs artists with scientists for collaborative projects that illustrates the researcher's work. As a participant in Artist & Researcher 3, I had the pleasure of receiving a personal two-hour lecture on epigenetics from Dr. Ite A. Offringa. She gifted me with an illustrated amusement park ride whose entryway intersected with territory I have not visited since high school biology. It brought back of bit of longing and memories of the time preceding college when I needed to choose whether to major in zoology or continue pursuing French, German, and English. Despite the joy the latter brought me, I do miss the road not traveled.
Dr. Offringa's descriptions evoked many images and the beauty of nature right down to its most microscopic components: the zipper of the DNA strand, the 20 beads of amino acids that make a protein, the units of letters that comprise the nucleotide language. I struggled with which images to select and what medium to use to portray Dr. Offringa's work. From the very beginning, a piece of fabric in my studio called to me but until then my artistic media included painting, drawing, ceramics, collage, and assemblage. I didn't see how to use the cloth. At last I realized embroidery was the key, even though my only experience with it was embroidering the back of a chambray shirt in the late 1970s. A great peace fell over me as I pulled the needle through the cloth, adjusting the minute entry point of its tip, planning, reworking, shifting and evoking the thread into a transformation from one material into another; the imagery of the alveolar's Cell 3 and Cell 1 as Dr. Offringa described them. As I worked in this manner, I felt at one with the precision, experimentation, repetition, and transformation that happens in the lab. A quick exchange about our work together can be found here at 49:19. |
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