These two images were taken of 5 mm glass cover slips dropped carefully onto webs inside a rotten tree trunk. The idea of installing cover slips into web structures was inspired by versions that Mel Grant initiated and made last year. Mel suggested trying this method to see if the spider would create further silken threads on or around the cover slips. More than anything I found the combination of glass and silk thread elements and structures fascinating.

 The upper image is a large web made in Cultivamos Cultura in August this year.

The lower image is a large piece of Venetian lace from the 17th century from the Whitworth Art Gallery’s textile collection.

The lace piece had several rips and repairs in it’s ground, one repair which can be seen here in the bottom left. These damaged ares and repairs across the collection appear like wounds, scarbs and scars,  the altered darned textures of the lace stand out like the altered architecture of wound tissue in skin. I wondered about returning to the collection and making an investigation of these wounds and scars in the textiles.

Of course the etymology of textile and tissue is the latin L. textura “web, texture, structure,” from stem of textere “to weave,” from PIE base *tek- “to make”, tek being the route of techné - technique, technology.

Last week I made a short visit to Cultivamos Cultura  in the Alentejo region of Portugal. It’s a new initiative that has been  created by Portuguese artist Marta de Menezes and scientist Luis Graca towards fostering and developing shared knowledges in science, technology and contemporary art.

 My brief visit was to get a flavour of the place and it’s possibilities so that I can make a more protracted visit next year.

The main building has several outhouses attached to it which have laid disused for some time, so a glorious collection of spider webs have accumulated. I became fascinated by the webs and took many photos some of which you can see here.

Farm Fountain

US artists Ken Renaldo and Amy Young made the centres an inaugeral residency for two weeks and within that time created this wonderful sculpture and installation Farm Fountain, images of which you can see here.

It’s a circuit of different living systems around the stucture of a fountain. A solar powered pump  circulates water up from the pond and into the grid of plants. The water is used by the plants and also filtered through the terracotta beads in the plant containers desceneding through the plant grid and back into the fish pond.

On their Flickr site they write:

Farm Fountain was started in our studio 2 years ago as an indoor ecosystem and local food production artwork that we hope others will reproduce. Info and instructions for the home version are available online at farmfountain.com

When I visited Marta topped up the plants, as the weather was so terrifically hot the system requited some human help. There were some great red chillis growing and a fragrant and delicious chocolate mint.

The SHSYSY cells have been growing on silk fibres since 24th May 09. Today I removed the tangles of fibres with their attacehd cells and placed them into new wells with fresh media - just to see. Silky nerves, nervous silks. It’s all incredibly crude but I’m just following my nose.

Mel Grant introduced me to Eric Hill who has been working with neuron and astrocyte cells  extensively. He’s made many spheres of neurons (known as blobs) by growing them on bacteria petri dishes, picking them up by pipette every two days so that they don’t attach and changing the medium - I think. I need to get the protocol but they grow in exquisite spheres rather than on the surface of the dish. Bacteria dishes are not tissue culture treated so not expecailly attractive to cells to attach to. This technique is called something like embryo spheres, Janet has done alot of it.

This conversation about bioreactors and incubators was a tangent to a conversation with Mel Grant yesterday about another tissue culture project.

Mel had a couple of thoughts re: the rotating bioractor idea (as well as talk to Eric)

Tumbler

Gyroscope

Made me think about enclosed spaces and different materials, environments and so on, and the polymer bioreactors of Zbigniew Oksiuta