POSTINDUSTRIAL ECOLOGIES
Summerhall, Edinburgh
Edinburgh Science Festival 2024

Fasciation is a glitch in the real. It is a mutation in plants that causes a repetition of cells leaving a branch to appear stretched much like corrupted files.  Willow branches normally grow in concentric circles, the tree clocks that tell time – a ring for each year. A fasciated willow looks like ribbon cables – flattened and fused. In the brownfield site, contaminated from the mine that once stood there, several different variants of willows have fasciated branches. Though a rare occurrence, the cells can mutate for many reasons including contamination.

I harvested multiple willows from the contaminated brownfield site in Gateshead and took them to ASCUS labs in Edinburgh. I embedded each branch in wax then shaved thin cross sections with a microtome, catching the slivers in warm water to stop it curling like a pencil shaving. On the glass slide, a drop of touladine blue, a polychromatic stain, helped to differentiate the structures under the darkfield microscope. All of the processes reveal the hidden cellular reality but the results appear even less ‘real’. 

Studio Notes:

I took the hundreds of images with a razor line of focus and combined them digitally, stacking and stitching to make one image. The image was intricately detailed, each cell in perfect definition. It was beautiful but only told part of the story. In one gallery at Summerhall, I chose to print 75 of the images and layer them in space, making the process physical and holding the spaces in between.  In the other gallery I have exhibited the branches, the stains, and the specimen I explored in the microscope and then expanded. 

As we live in a world where imagery is constantly manipulated both by humans and machines, how do we know the real? As the software evolves, and the machines learn, the line becomes harder and harder to see. In early days of AI, hands were the tell – 6 fingers, a dead give away. Now we have crossed over the uncanny valley into the unknown. Could things like fasciation be the tell? The disruption, the imperfection showing life?