The Covid Quilts: Part 2

We all know that the last 6 months have been tough.  I am married to a front line NHS worker so we had been following the growth of this illness for some time.  It was clear that things were going to be bad from mid February.  I had read stories of what was happening in the hospitals of Northern Italy and could see it was only a matter of time before it was over here.  Nicky was battling with getting decent PPE and the right to wear it on wards with coughing patients still waiting for a diagnosis taking days to come through.

I was still teaching at Hereford College of Arts.  The last day before lockdown, as I walked to the station I overheard two students behind me talking; they talked about how they wouldn’t mind getting ‘IT’ because they could do with ‘a bit of a skive’.  I was so angry I couldn’t turn to look at them.  They were young and naïve but I thought of the older people in their lives and how they might be affected by the illness.

Nicky led from the front and was one of the first of her team to dress up like an astronaut and go onto ITU. She works in cardiology and Covid does horrible things to your heart; echocardiograms were in high demand.  The first time she went up there she said it was like a war zone; she was clearly shaken; she stopped talking about what was going on during the 12 hour shifts day and night.

I was at home feeling fairly helpless.  I am zooming away to my students from Hereford trying to keep them positive and working, but in comparison to what Nicky was doing it felt very small. 

I am a quilter; that’s what I do.  So I decided to quilt and this piece is the result.

I started with a simple ‘Stay Safe’ and then another for my sister, but I knew that I wanted to make a bigger more considered piece.

It says what I wanted to say to those two young people.

 

 

Crash course in 3D modelling

Okay now if you know anything at all about this 3D modelling programme please don’t read any further because my working knowledge is so limited.

BARC have a number of online catalogues that allow you to examine their collection.  The Digitised Diseases is a website that allows you to closely examine a bone, rotating it and zooming in.

Here is an example to make your eyes' water of a dislocated shoulder.

http://www.digitiseddiseases.org/mrn.php?mrn=R1003

Click on the ‘view model’ and after it has loaded on a new screen (which might take a little while if you have an old computer or slow broadband) you can clearly see that the ball has come out of its socket.  Ouch.  The website allows you to rotate around the subject as well as zoom in.

Now this has been done by a detailed scan of the object; its done with lasers marking every millimetre or so of the surface.  You have to sweep the object many times to cover all the surface.  This data is processed into a series of dots that software then links into a mesh model; think serious dot to dot in three dimensions.  The image at the beginning of this post is an example of the ‘dot view’ of a skull that I have been looking at.

Here is a detail of the left eye socket from closer and a slightly different angle.  The dots are being lit from front and above.  The dark dots are either in 'shade' or seen from behind.

To be honest this next bit  is where I cant quite get my head around the enormity of what the software is doing.  The software then lays a photo of the original surface over the model to make the model ‘realistic’.  You can then rotate and zoom in on it.  Here is the ‘mesh view’ of the same eye socket.

The arcs are the vertical and horizontal axis.  This image was saved with the background set on default. And this is a close up of that view so you can clearly see the triangles making up the mesh.

Now one of the aspects I am interested in developing work in response to is the data behind the rotating model; the dots and the mesh.  I don’t know what I’ll do with it if anything.  I just think it’s a lovely example of technology helping us see and understand things.

View from the other end

Quite a few people have asked me about the ‘top end’ of the piece.  Because the public aren’t allowed up the top end of the Spinning room most visitors cant see all of my piece up close.

So here are a couple of pictures showing the piece from up there.  There is a view of the piece down the room and a close up looking towards the very end.  If you are paying attention you’ll notice the ECG (the red line) is very different to further down.  That’s the difference between 60 bpm and 181 bpm.