Intentionally creating a topsy-turvy journey through the rifts, valleys, and mountains of epidermal cells, so unbelievably small, I painstakingly inserted Nano images measuring approximately 20 μm, in to the flower petals I photographed with a macro lens.
Imagine a landscape of one million epidermal cells covering a single rose petal of 2x2cm2 — where an atom to a rose cell is the equivalent to a hedgehog below Mont Blanc!
The composition is a close reproduction, of “Still Life with Flowers on a Marble Tabletop”, an oil painting by the Dutch artist, Rachel Ruysch, 1716, (collection of the Rijks Museum, Amsterdam).
The original beetle scale, a Nano image of A. Parisotto, (Institut Adolphe Merkle), reveals a layer of 10, 000 chitin balls, some perfectly arranged as six-sided polygons or haphazardly clustered together. I tried pasting hexagonal repeat patterns’ over the scale when recreating the image as a means of attempting to understand it and improving the image aesthetically, the result was artificial so I digitally pasted each chitin ball in place.
The layer of chitin became a tram of matter for the virus coats (capsids) in my pathogen series. I visualized the coat as a kind of chain-mail armory and hope eventually to make an artwork taking this idea further.
