Also watch BBC Television interview with Jerram about this work.
Interview with the Wellcome Collection, London 2009.
The series is a reflection of my interest in how images of phenomena are represented and presented to the public. I’m colour blind and this has given me a natural interest in exploring the edges of perception.
Often images of viruses are taken in black and white on an electron microscope and then they are coloured artificially using Photoshop. Sometimes that will be for scientific purposes but other times it will be just to add emotional content or to make the image more attractive.
The problem is that you end up with a percentage of the public believing that viruses are these brightly coloured objects. These are often portrayed in newspapers as having an air of scientific authenticity and objective truth, whereas actually that isn’t the case. Viruses are so small they have no colour. They’re smaller than the wavelength of light.
Originally, I made a glass sculpture of HIV that people could hold in their hand and contemplate the global issues of what that virus is doing to the world.
What’s interesting is how the imagery of a virus, say HIV, has changed and developed as scientists’ understanding of the virus has improved, along with ways of visualising/imaging a virus has improved with finer and finer detail.
Also, with viruses you can very quickly come to the edge of scientific understanding. We can photograph a virus with an electron microscope, but it’s sometimes difficult to see what’s going on inside it because the technology is at the very edge of its capability and the resolution isn’t quite good enough. So you end up having to jump from what you can see to what you can infer from chemical modelling. There’s sometimes a gap in understanding and (even for virologists) a certain amount of guesswork in what a virus looks like. Exploring the edges of scientific understanding is really interesting for me.
With 3D sculptures, there’s also a tangibility you can’t get from flat pictures. There are diagrams of a virus and then there are photographs of a virus from electron microscopes. The purpose of a diagram is to communicate details in a very clear and concise way, whereas the scientific photos of viruses do something different. And a 3D representation makes you look at it in another, different, way.
When did you decide to add Swine Flu to the series?
At the beginning of the outbreak I was diagnosed with swine flu. It was strange designing the sculpture with a fever whilst swalling my Tamiflu tablets every few hours. I remember there was a lot of confusion as to whether the virus was going to wipe out a third of the global population. There were lots of different scientific imagery and diagrams flying around in the media. The reason I made the Swine Flu sculpture is because people care about it. What I’m doing is providing an alternative representation of the virus for the public to consider.