Experimenting on a human

So far, the images I've used to inspire my embroidered works have been of the brains of smaller mammals like rats and mice. While some of the images supplied by Dr Adam Hamlin and his colleagues have been of living creatures, most of the subjects have been, sadly, deceased. This is a common problem in neuroscience: you can't simply open up a skull and watch the brain at work in vivo. Magnetic resonance imaging is one way of looking at the details of a living brain, although the problem of keeping the subject still for long enough to get a decent amount of detail continues to limit the usefulness of the machines.

When a friend recently had an MRI for medical reasons, I jumped at the chance to perform my stitching experiment on a living brain, and a human brain at that. I am looking at this work as a cross between a very intimate portrait of my friend, and an investigation into understanding the science behind magnetic resonance imaging and what it can show us about the insides of our skulls.

Here's the work in progress.