Works in progress

With the date of our public talk and showing of my work fast approaching (have you put May 4th in your diary?), I am starting to feel the pressure to complete some more of my pieces. Yesterday household responsibilities kept me out of the studio, so I thought I'd show you the progress I've made so far on the series of works based on images showing apoptosis (cell death) in the forebrain in Alzheimer's disease. (Click on the links below to see the original images from Dr Adam Hamlin that these embroideries are based on.)

This work is a depiction of healthy cells with their even distribution and strong connections. Notice how the small running stitches, even though they travel across the work in random directions, are in nice orderly lines, and the French knots are neatly connected by the long, straight stitches. This work represents complexity and order.

In this partially stitched work, I've tried to represent the chaos of the dying cells: when it's finished, the randomly scattered seed stitch will fill the spaces around the disconnected French knots and straight stitches.

The final image features a few lonely neurons in a sea of emptiness, so I kept the stitching to a small strip across an otherwise bare piece of fabric. This work is a requiem to brain function, although it allows some hope by the fact that the remaining cells are connected and orderly once again.