The cunning plan

photo:Tiff Radmore

Dr Matthew Howard at Kings College London has two research students working on stitched electrical components that are designed to either monitor muscle movements or capture the electrical impulses of the muscles themselves.  The plan for the Parallel Practice project is that I design, programme and embroider simple circuits to start with and stitch on the PCBs or chips.  Matthew and his colleagues will have done the programming to make the sensors capture what we hope to capture and so in turn can feed back potential improvements.  We know we won’t get it right first time; we know we will have technical glitches, bugs in the system, broken threads, short circuits and lots of problems that we don’t even know about, but this is a project about experimenting and collaborating and this is what we intend to do

the leper's skull

Not being an anatomist of any kind I find the ‘small’ bones hard to see in terms of their wider context.  However this x-ray of a skull and complete mandible is very striking.  Its from the Medieval lepers’ cemetery in Chichester. 

X-rays of the bones in the BARC collection at the University of Bradford are remarkable because they are just bones (and no living body attached) so they can be x-rayed to a higher intensity giving beautifully clear images.

Professor Keith Manchester says that there are early signs of bone absorption around the nose which would indicate that this person was suffering from leprosy.

Brmm Brmm!

Now those of those who know the art quilt world will know that there are all sorts of strict rules on what you can show on a blog before a final piece is shown in an exhibition.  This means I can only show work in progress and have to be careful with which images I do show.

How do you quilt a whole cloth quilt that 3msq?  I have had the new Pfaff Powerquilter on loan at home.  Its beautiful to use, 18 inch long arm and up to 1,500 stitches a minute.

Brumm Brumm!
I am currently at the Knitting and Stitch show in London demonstrating the Powerquilter.  Pop along if you fancy a go.
http://www.theknittingandstitchingshow.com/london/

The leper's hands

As part of the ‘Error bred in the bone’ project I started looking at evidence of leprosy in the BARC collection.  Now the evidence of the disease in the collection in two main forms: The bones from the medieval cemetery of St James and Mary Magdalene in Chichester and the Andersen Archive a collection of x-rays from a leper’s hospital in Addis Ababa in the 1980s.  You can see the online catalogue here
http://www.barc.brad.ac.uk/FromCemeterytoClinic/

One of the common myths about leprosy is that your fingers, toes and nose drop off.  It’s not true.  What does happen is that the bacteria are most active in in the cooler parts of the body; the extremities and the nasal passage.  What happens is your body starts to reabsorb your bone and so your fingers and toes start to shorten and the bones in the nose start to disappear.  In the early stages sometime the fingers lock into a ‘claw’.

I find the Andersen archive heart breaking.  These were images taken living memory, in fact Dr Keith Manchester says he thinks he can identify some of the patients form these x-rays from his time out at the hospital.  And 30 years ago the medication was good but wouldn’t have halted the loss of bone.  The patients’ hands in these x-rays would have continued to deteriorate after the image was taken.

These x-rays have become the starting point for some digital stitch pieces that I will talk about in a future post.

Parallel Practices

Those of you who know my work, will know I get a bit obsessive about digitally programmed embroidery.  You’ll also know that I’m fascinated in medical data as a starting point for my work, so when I saw that the  Crafts Council were looking  for makers who were interested  in working with medical academics at Kings College London I jumped at the chance.

It’s a long story but I met Dr Matthew Howard who lectures in Informatics at an event organised by the Crafts Council and KCL and we got on like a house on fire.  Our bid to make embroidered electrical connections for sensors stitched into garments to measure both movements of the wearer and the electrical impulses in the muscles causing the movement was accepted as one of four residences as part of the Parallel Practices project.

The plan will involve working with Matthew’s research students to make the ‘technology’ work with bespoke, cutting edge components and programming and with Pfaff sewing machines to make the ‘stitch’ using conductive thread and embroidery software.

Now if we can get the technology to work, we hope to make garments that can capture movements and electrical impulses……and if we can get this all to work well, then we’ll be able to make the garments and its technology to look pretty,….. and if we can do it well, then I’ll have the time to make the garments with aesthetic considerations to the muscles structures below or the electrical data we have captured.

Starry Starry night

This is a dot view of the top of a cranium.  I just think it’s a lovely image but more importantly two osteologists in Bradford recognised it.

Fab!