I suppose architectures is the simplest and most immediate way to communicate what I am trying to do, architectures in process in time.

Hannah Landecker begins Culturing Life, How Cells Became Technolgies, with a quote from Alexis Carrel:

A Tissue is evidently and enduring thing. It’s functional and structural conditions become modified from moment to moment. Time is really the fourth dimension of living organisms. It enters as a part into the constittion of a tissue. Cell colonies, or organs, are events which progressively unfold themselves. They must be studied like history.
The New Cytology”, Science 73 (1931): 297 - 303

One of my preoccupation working with tissue culture is with organisations, patterns and structures, architectures and extensions, arrangements. Architecture as extensions, spatial and bodily, speculations and evocations of possibilities.

Architect Lebbeus Woods has worked with conceptualising structures and repairs as architecture of scabs and scars constructed onto the wounds of war torn buildings of Sarajeveo, not erasing histories, refecting time and asserting narratives of dynamic healing within the actual process of architecture.

The Scientist has a recent article on architects working from biology: http://www.the-scientist.com/news/home/53443/

The essential practical work I have done so far have been some simple investigations with cell adhesion, attempts to convince theHaCat cells to grow in some areas of the dish and not on others.

The first versions was to block out areas with Poly - HEME, the idea being that the blocked out areas would prove resistant to the cells.

I tried two variations of this, one growing the cells in media (DMEM - Dulbecco’s Modified Eagle’s Medium) with the usual addition of serum (FBS - foetal bovine serum or FCS - foetal calf serum). Areas of the dishes were painted with poly-HEME and a suspension of HaCat culture introduced.

The cells thrived and grew all over the dishes, regardless of the presence of poly-HEME.

I repeated the process, this time using DMEM without the addition of serum - the thought being that the serum provides the cells with the extra cellular matrix that enables their proliferation - taking it out of the equation would perhaps disable such easy growth - but no. They still thrived regardless. Willfull.

Decided to take another approach.

The plates used to culture bacteria do not have the properties and charge that allows for cell adhesion; HaCats do adhere to collagene, so today I treated a bacteria dish with collagen 4 and plated it with HaCat cells in the hope that they might attach to the collgen and not anywhere else.

We’ll see.

Many of these processes, although simple in principle leave me fumbling with pipettes, dilutions and infintessimal weights. Ratios and dilutions give me the biggest grief. It’s all simple arithmatic but I get into a panic. However I’m being consistantly guided with all the lab work by Franbee, one of the post docs in the lab who has been patiently supervising my elementary tissue culture and running me though the processes.

She encourages me to talk to my cells and to get to know when and warns me about the perils of bread baking and tissue culture. (Yeast is a priamry contaminant of cells cultures.)

Actaully most people I’ve spoken to who work with culturing cells admit quite happily to conversations down the microscope. The empathy and encouragement required to get to know your cells, to make sure ‘you’re all on the same team’, as Franbee said is crucial to a healthy culture. Consistantly looking, seeing and familiarising myself with the cultures from some weeks of almost consistant working with them is giving me some kind of awareness, albeit basic. One flask I’ve allowed to grow confluent and to keep going way beyond, stratifying and building. It looks utterly different now, bunched up and solid, a mass.

Much of the intial period of the residency has been about familiarising myself with some of the research activities within the school and engaging in dialogues that might lead towards developing some work. I’ve been sitting in on the occasional lab meeting , research seminar and consuming copious amounts of tea/coffee/cake/balti. I’ve had some fascinating converstaions that have been encouraging when I’ve asked about doing actual practical work in the lab. From this I’m beginnging to form a list of processes I would like to engage in that would give me some imporatant informtion and thinking around the kinds of materials, structures and processes I may end up working with.

This has included visiting the School of Medicine and discussing culturing endothelium cells, the cells that make up the interior surface of blood cell. When cultured they organsise into tubular structures. Under the microscope they have a distinctive cobblestone appearance. Architectures and formal structures is an enduring theme within this all, but equally I am intrigued by the chaotic and irrationality of tumours.

Microcontact printing (µCP) is another process that came up in Chemical Engineering. Using proteins that cells attach to and proteins that cells non-adhere to, to form structures and patterns. This relates to previous research I did whilst artist in residence at SymbioticA to culture a living lace. The geometrical patterning and engineered disipline of lace suggested a formalism and architecture whilst the specificity of lace situates it as a cultural fabric.

So I’m playing with mono layers and possible 3-D strutures.

ORLAN is currently an artist in residence at SymbioticA : the art and science collaborative research laboratory in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at The University of Western Australia. Her project at SymbioticA, The Harlequin’s Coat, will be created with skin cells cultivated in vitro, taken from ORLAN and from people with various skin colour and origin.

ORLAN will conduct further lectures in August for students and will exhibit at the Holmes a Court Gallery, Goddard de Fiddes and in the SymbioticA exhibition Still,Living at The Bakery ARTRAGE complex during BEAP2007

Day 1 in the school was a reintroduction to the basics of tissue culture (T.C.), an acticity I’d got my hands wet and comfortable with in SymbioticA, and was keen to continue with. Anticipating my rustiness and that labs work differerently from place to place I was ready to get some good instruction on dos and don’ts.

Previously I had learnt aspects of tissue culturing from artists, Cynthia Vesparget and Ionat Zurr,  this time I was being instructed by a scientist. The cell culture I was given to practice with are HaCats, a human keratinocyte cell line, (immortalised cells).  I got reaquainted with the aseptic techniques that try to eliminate the possibility of contamination of the cultures and the laboratory equipement.

I love tissue culture. I have a complete fascination with the manipulation and cultivation of these microscopic modules, isolates, grown and disseminated into multiple scenarios and possibilities. I wondered about the HaCat cell line history, some 20 years old I was told,  and it’s point of physical origin.

I began my residency at The school of Biosciences, The University of Birmingham on 25th June with a speculative schedule of research and developent activity following an initial orientating and project identifying period.

This first entry is going to be a little scattershot as I try and capture some of thoughts and activites that have occupied me here at the school and related areas.

I’m embedded within the school with a deskspace in one of the busy labs beside the tea room. The place runs on cake I’ve been informed in no uncertain terms.

As a preliminary to my residency I gave a talk at one of the lunch time reserach seminars in order to introduce myself, my practice and the notion of a residency within a bioscience context, titled How to have a body, - now. I was keen to position my practice and to give some  access to it by discussing works that has both influenced and informed my desire to begin working with living biological material and biotechnical practices. This included:

• The bodily sculpture Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, particulary Hesses latex works, skin like and minimal.
• The anatomical drawings of Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty and Juan Valverde de Amusco.
• The radical surgical interventions of Orlan.
• The Visible Human Project as portraiture.
• The photographic recordings and construstion of Salpetrière under the auspice of Charcot.

I discussed encountering the work of The Tissue Culture and Art Project as an intervention of sorts into my primarily body based performance practice and my introduction to biomedia. I also wanted to engage the schools scientific communcity with the scope of enquiries both formal and philosophical of practices as varied as those of Luke Jerram, Marta de Menezes, Adam Zaretsky and George Gessert for example.

I also discussed the residency I did at SymbioticA from late 2003-04 during which I was concerned with trying to create a living lace from a skin culture derived from my body, it’s trials, challenges and the many unanticipated outcomes that emerged from the work, including the performance work inthewrongplaceness.

The concluding slide contained the following provocative quote that says much about transformation and mutability:

“when you fall into syncope, you
never know in what shape you might
return: with wolf’s paws, the tail of a
serpent, a bark at your lips, a pelt or
fur. . . . One never knows”

Catherine Clément, Syncope, the philosophy of rapture.