[spilth]

2.2.16

Pole Tay Pole - visual research into Dundee's connections with the whaling industry and polar exploration

At the moment in uni we are working on a project to create something (ANYTHING!) linked to Dundee's extensive history of polar exploration and whaling industry with an end to exhibit in the D'Arcy Thompson museum. This kind of project always has the potential to end in total disaster due to the open brief and its fairly short time scale but thankfully (for me) this subject matter has connections with D'Arcy Thompson who was a Scottish biologist and mathematician amongst other things!

This is Baleen, which is whale (some species) teeth! It was used in corsets and was a big industry, especially in Dundee

This is the skeleton of the "Tay Whale." It was trapped in the Tay and once it was eventually found dead, it was a massive spectacle and people would come and see it and get their picture taken with its carcass. It now hangs in the McMillan Gallery in Dundee.

A comparison of whale sizes. The type of whale most often hunted was the right whale, which had baleen for teeth and was easy to pull along on the whaling boats.

D'Arcy Thompson collected all manner of specimens during his time in Dundee and some of these still remain in the city today. One of these specimens is a sea squirt (I know!!) which was collected on the Dundee Antarctic Expedition of 1892 and it's super cool and mysterious. They originally thought it was a new species of ascidian (sea squirt) and one of D'Arcy Thompson's assistants, C.M. Donald, wrote a paper on it for the Quarterly Journal of Microscopal Science (old science stuff) detailing the (thousands) of ins and outs of the sea squirt. It turned out much later that the species already existed and was called Dystaplia Cylindrical that was discovered in 1830 (whoops!)

A selection of specimens and things from the D'Arcy Thompson museum including THE SEA SQUIRT!

I found it quite difficult to find a lot about this particular species of sea squirt because everything was either WAAAAAAYYYYYY to sciencey for me or focused mainly on the brighter more sexy sea squirts of the tropics. My sea squirt is beige and pretty boring after you've drawn it a few times. I got a copy of C.M. Donald's paper and began to decipher it word by word. I learned about a lot of biology stuff like brachial sac and languets and endostyles and dorsal and ventral and much much more. I learned that this type of sea squirt was actually not ONE sea squirt at all but millions of microscopic sea squirts all joined together! They are called Ascidiozooids (which is fast becoming my favourite word) and numbers of them form around a common cloaca (another of my faves) and that's how they squirt!

A couple of examples of the kinds of sea squirts that were throwing my google searches all off! These are examples of solitary ascidians, sometimes known as tunicates.

Examples of solitary and compound sea squirts from the sea slug forum. The arrows show how each one functions, C is an example of a colonial sea squirt not unlike the one in D'Arcy Thompson's collection.

I've been looking at the beautiful work of Ernst Haeckl for inspiration in biological colour and form as well as a number of textile artists who recreate colourful biological specimens. I am hoping to create a large scale interactive anatomical wall hanging of the anatomy of a single zooid in the sea squirt colony of D'Arcy Thompson's museum.

Ernst Haeckl

Rachel Ignotovsky

Sarah Maloney

Shanell Papp

Aaaaaaaand FINALLY! My class are having an exhibition of all of our work from this project next week! There will be an opening on Friday 12th (times to come, follow me on twitter for more details!) and we will also be open on Sunday the 14th if you feel like taking your valentines date to a zoology museum! If you are in Dundee come to the D'Arcy Museum on Dundee Uni campus and see all of our work!

13.12.15

'Goodnight'

This is a wee story book made over a few days in the studio. We were all given a specific time (mine was 2:26am) and asked to imagine something that could be happening at that time. The time of this project was around Halloween and I had halloweeny things on the brain so I did a wee story about a wee kid who can't sleep because of all the scary things swirling around in his head.

Here are some pics of the finished book:

5.10.15

"Running Away..." A Book in a Day

Today we were given a brief to create a book in a day. We were given the title "Running Away..." and a picture of a ladder in the snow which we had to use as a springboard for our narrative. I remembered a couple of weeks ago I saw a man up a ladder outside the library and he had his head in the ceiling and it looked like he had no head. I used this as the inspiration for my story of a man who wakes up one day to a frightful surprise. His head is gone and it isn’t coming back!

30.5.15

'what's ET short for?'

hey loyal fans! uni has wound down and I have been using my spare time wisely (mostly knitting poop emojis and getting drunk and spending a lot of time on trains). here's a selection from my phone from the last month or so...