Microscope View of Hands

We worked up a series where we looked at different aspects of the hands through a USB digital microsope.

Looking at a marker smudge on a palm revealed the microscopic strangeness of ink meeting skin patterns. This inspired us to test how different liquids and inks looked on skin at a microscopic level.

A rose gold wedding band, appearing smooth, reveals years of dings and scratches.

Nailbeds full of alginate - suffering for her art!!

Highlights were combining clean skin and black ink - the ink highlights the chasms and geometries of the skin.

We also had a lot of fun working with silver and gold inks

Comments

Ape Hands

Paolo the nattily dressed English accented zoologist met me before opening at Dublin's Dead Zoo . There is a great podcast of him here . He explained to me all the facts below. First thing is human skeletons tend to be many different people because that’s just how bones were collected Animals specimens were usually collected for the task so are more complete. With an experts eye Paolo can show you where the animal was shot. for example the apes in the pelvis and the arm Or in the case of the polar bear 19 times when he wandered into a camp and all the explorers just started blasting away. Then they ate him. But avoided the liver as that has so much Vitamin D it’ll kill you. Kill you by causing excess bone growth . " A polar bear's liver contains between 24,000 and 35,000 IU per gram. Compare that to the tolerable upper level of vitamin A intake for a healthy adult human: 10,000 IU’  Onto hands Orangutans have really short thumbs not going past the knuckle. T...

Microscopic surface tension

Pouring a small drop of a softdrink onto the palm Viewed through the microscope, we can see small particles on the surface of the liquid. Similarly we can see the surface tension holding the liquid in a roughly hemi-spherical shape on the palm. For some reason the group decided to pour pepper into a palm and microscope it.

Embroidered Hand

Jen's hand embroidered by Bionic Laura

Back of my hand

Search This Blog