Microscopic Images Created From Body Swabs
I’m really pleased with the images I’ve managed to amass from the few samples that were taken. Experimenting with the different dyes has enabled me to develop a great diversity of colours in the images which is exciting.
Now, my main concern is how to display them. I have cropped them to a circular shape as I like directness of the connection to the view down the microscope. I have toyed with the possibility of heat pressing them onto some sort of board so that they can stand alone, hung on the wall as discs.
However, another idea is to frame them, floating in box frames.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these ideas. A friend told me that she leaves her prints unframed as she likes the simultaneous strength and vulnerability this gives to the image. I like this idea and how it links in with the power and vulnerability of woman in society but there’s something in me that likes the ‘housing’ of the images in a frame. It reminds me of an air-tight seal, clinical and clean which I think of as empowering. ‘This is clean and undiluted fact, untainted’. Yes! That is why I want them to be sealed. My initial desire to create this project was driven by a search for some way of depicting woman in a form entirely untainted by masculinity. The beautiful complexity of the female is demonstrated through the qualities of the image, sealed in its contained environment, untainted by misogyny.
