Felt

As a bacteriology major, I spent many hours looking at micro-organisms through a microscope. For Serratia over San Francisco, I’ve felted bacterial forms in a tangible scale to represent scientific experiments done over the Bay Area in the 1950’s. See story below.

The bacteria Serratia marcescens is anaerobic, gram-negative bacillus of the family enterobacteriaeae with some strains producing a pigment that ranges in intensity from dark red to pale pink. The pigmented colonies of S. marcescens are now attributed to numerous reports in classicial history of drops of blood on food. Until relatively recently it was considered harmless and as recently as the early 1970’s used as a biologic marker to demonstrate bacterial spread. 

Perhaps the most controversial use of Serratia as a marker is the aerosolization experiments conducted by the United States Army in which S. marcescens was used to study the vulnerability of the population to germ warfare. In 1950, Navy ships released the bacteria into the ocean off the coast of San Francisco where the organism became aerosolized by ocean waves and was blown inland. In December, 1976, it was reported that these experiments had coincided with an outbreak of S. marcescens at a San Francisco hospital in 1950. Eleven cases of urinary tract infection occurred with one patient dying of serratia endocarditis. These bacterial strains were not archived and never compared to the strain used in the experiments. Army testing was done in other locations during this time period but the Center for Disease Control in assessing 100 outbreaks of S.marcescens found that none were caused by the same strain as used by the Army. Serratia marcescens is now implicated as an etiologic agent of infection for multiple organ systems as well as a serious cause of nosocomial (hospital acquired) infection

Yu, VL: Serratia marcescens: Historical Perspective and Clinical Review. New England Journal of Medicine 300:887-893, 1979.
Mahlen, S: Serratia Infections: from Military Experiments to Current Practice. Clinical Microbiology Reviews October 24 (4): 755-791, 2011.

As a laboratory technologist, I examined Wright stained red blood smears with a microscope. Occasionally I would come across a crenated red blood cell, an artifact of staining that produces spherical erthyrocytes with protrusions. Crenation is an installation of these forms on a background proportional to a microscope slide. Unexpectedly coming across a crenated cell was like finding a prize!

I’m drawn to spherical forms covered in spicules, a form found throughout nature. Viruses, crenated red blood cells, spores, and liquidamber fruits are a few examples I’ve used for my art work. In my Berkeley neighborhood, liquidamber trees, also known as sweet gum, drop their fruits on side walks and gutters in February and March. I wait for the perfect dry, sunny day to collect them.

At a point in the past, my studio was filled with wool roving and tea bags. I was destined to combine the two materials.