Working with Live Painting Materials

This blog documents a science & art collaboration, namely the development of an art-making process involving cultivating/growing images in petri dishes that can then be printed and stabilized on paper. Above are two such prints made from one petri dish. (To see any of these photographs in more detail, simply click on the image.) Please visit our website to see a gallery of current work.

World Science Festival Street - What Grows?

Thank you to everyone who visited our tent at the World Science Festival Street Fair on Sunday -- and a special thanks to the 200+ artists who contributed drawings (or written ideas) to our Impressions of Growing collective art project. We will be very VERY busy in the lab growing your ideas in e. coli over the summer! Check back (or subscribe to our blog) for updates on our progress... and our plans to share this work with you.
*Annie, Lissa & Ivory... our deepest thanks, we couldn't have done it without you!

Printing Day at the Harlem DNA Lab

photo by joey o'laughlin

Success! After 18 hours in the incubator, our bacteria designs emerged in a beautiful range of blues and effects. The students/scientists/artists had mixed both transformed and normal bacteria together to create subtle combinations of blue and white designs... and many strong blue images were grown and printed today. Bravo!


After we printed all the work, and mounted them in petri dish frames, each student contributed 3-5 of their prints to an installation of their work. Here we are composing that piece -- and then velcro-ing our prints into place.

photo by joey o'laughlin

A huge thanks to Ileana Rios of the Harlem DNA Lab, Summer Ash of the World Science Festival, and Mr. Patton from the Thurgood Marshall Academy for making this experience possible.

Harlem DNA Lab - World Science Festival

As part of the World Science Festival's outreach events, we introduced our living paint to 9th graders from the Thurgood Marshall Academy. Thanks to our host, Ileana Rios and the Harlem DNA Lab (a project of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) students learned how to perform a genetic transformation of e.coli bacteria (each making their own version of our "paint") and everyone made 8-10 bacterial paintings. We can't wait to see how the images grow -- all will be revealed on Friday when we return to print our work! Check back for updates.

Talk at the Brooklyn Museum of Art

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to share the story of our collaboration with my arts-education colleagues at the April 21st "Inspiration is the Destination" conference at the Brooklyn Museum. A few photos from the slide-talk, thanks Emily Shu!

Ecoli -- natural variations on a theme

This is a favorite piece from the show. A self portrait of our media.

Installation Images from Serrano Contemporary

Our show is down -- but here are some photos in case you missed it. Above is the installation of 30 E. coli prints mounted in glass petri dishes. Close up below. Click on any photograph for a larger view.



Artist & Scientist

Upcoming Exhibition - Growing Impressions

My scientist collaborator, Kristin Baldwin, and I have the opportunity to exhibit this work at Serrano Contemporary in NYC from Feb 19 - March 18. Invitation below. Come on by!

Work from Jan 09 -- growing and printed

An image in bacteria, growing on agar -- and then printed onto paper

Translating Bacteria Prints to Cyanotypes

Very excited about learning this old fashioned photographic process - using the sun to make contact prints from a "negative".

I've selected some of the bacterial prints, which are typically small on 2, 4 or 6 inch circles... and enlarging these onto transparency material using a photocopier. Then... waiting for a strong sunny day to print these onto paper i've sensitized. The one above happens to be very dark... others come out much lighter, depending on the strength of the sun and length of exposure time.

Fern Shadow, Ecoli in Process

This is one of the first successful bacteria paintings, cultivated with the help of Dr. Kristin Baldwin, it was later printed onto paper and stabilized with a coat of resin.

Fern Shadow: Transformed Ecoli Bacteria Print

Here it is printed on paper.

It all Began with this Piece

Dr. Kristin Baldwin was given this piece for her birthday. I made it by laying down threads in thick blankets of glue, and was exploring things two lines might do without touching. And it got her thinking... and next thing I know, she had proposed creating a living paint -- a strain of bacteria that she modified to turn blue when it comes in contact with another chemical -- a chemical I can paint with on petri dishes.

The first handoff

We did our first experiment up at her lab at Columbia one evening in December of 2005-- here she is the following evening, after the plates had had a day in the incubator, handing them off to me so I can go print them up in my apartment. The blurred movement is her demonstrating how to quickly lift off the piece of filter paper to get a good print.

The first plates and prints

December 05 - This is what grew and was printed. I substituted heavy printing paper for the more delicate lab-filter paper and that worked well. I sealed the bugs onto the paper with cytoseal (acrylic resin normally used to seal specimens on glass slides). These prints were beautiful to me -- with distinct colonies of transformed (blue) ecoli and unaltered ecoli (translucent/white) visible. The only problem was that no trace of my hand or brush stroke was visible. Not yet quite the 3-way collaboration we had in mind (scientist, nature, artist). Back to the lab.

Early Bacteria Prints - Learning to Gain Control

These are other prints from further attempts to cultivate this bacteria into images. It took 5 days in the lab to gain some control over the media. When it is "painted" it is in solution and clear, and thus a little tricky to control.

At last, a way to guide my hand

In the lab, trying to find some way to guide making a sharp image on the agar, I realize I have a sketchbook with tracings of shadows -- and discover that I can see and trace these contours through the transparent agar. Phew.

Printed Wildflower Bacteria Painting

The completed print.
April 2006

Ecoli Bacteria Wildflowers - in process

And the guided painting method works -- this time using a very dry plate to minimize running.

Fungi Hunting at STR June'06

Kristin and I brought our work to Montana last June 06, and it caught the imagination of Dr. Dave Sands, a plant pathologist at the University of Montana in Bozeman. He had us all combing the field for signs of "vascular rot" in hopes of finding some colorful fungi we could cultivate to create a different variety of native paints for me to try.Below is our makeshift petri dish (knox gelatin in a pie plate) and Dave extracting some of the fungi to see if we could get it to flourish and make some interesting colors.


It looked like a promising experiment, but our gelatin gave way after a few days and became liquid before the fungi had a chance to grow. Onward and upward.