Towards the end of part two of this project I began to look deeper into gender and this is where I started to look at the science side of gender. An artist I looked at which inspired me to go down this route was Michele Banks and her series ‘Portrait of a human’. In this project she created a series of watercolour paintings that were made to look like human cells and bacteria. The idea behind this was to show that although each person is unique in their own way and have their own identities, when you look down to the science of it we are all essentially the same. I have been inspired by this idea and want to create visuals that represent this, stripped right back to the science of gender, binaries etc to give a message that male, female, non-binary, we are all human’s made of the same and it is through our lifestyles, personalities and clothing that we wear we create our identities.

Klari Reis

Klari Reis is an American based artist who uses resin and paints to create Petri dish inspired installations. On her website her work is described as using the creative process in both painting and science as metaphors for one another: for curiosity and exploring and documenting the natural and unnatural world with a sense of wonder and hope. These Petri dishes are created as part of a series called Hypochondria, which see’s these dishes as installations in various locations varying from 30 to 150 dishes.

 

My Own Experiment

For my next step in this project I wanted to recreate these Petri dishes so that I can then either scan them in and manipulate them or use them as some sort of installation in the final exhibition of my work. To create my own Petri dishes I used molds that’s I filled with resin and then used epoxy resin colourants that I dropped into the resin. I then used a hairdryer to manipulate the paint to create weird and cell like shapes within the molds. These are some of the final outcomes for this experiment.