This was a joint project with water colour artist Sarah Roberts to study the interaction of naturally occurring pigmented bacteria (living paints) with traditional water colours. Sarah painted a series of separate shapes onto an agar surface using the red pigmented bacterium Serratia marcescens and various watercolours. When the paintings were incubated overnight to allow the bacteria to grow, something remarkable occurred. Many people, including Alexander Fleming, have painted with bacteria before, but here the bacteria had swarmed over the agar surface and actually moved the water colours around transforming the painting completely. In doing so, the bacteria had converted a lifeless image into something far more dynamic. The new and vibrant painting that emerges is an expression of their otherwise invisible activity and also a manifestation of our current scientific understanding of the complexity of bacterial behaviour, how they swarm, communicate, move together in a coordinated manner, and build channels to irregatate large bacterial communities
All I can say is – Wow! I make my own watercolour paints from local pigments. I have just been levigating glauconite from sandy black clay collected off a beach near Dunedin. Got a real surprise when I discovered the black colouring came from the black glauconite grains. The glauconite is green when ground in binder. I often wonder about the bacteria living in the clay residue from the levigation. Must have a go!
Looks like you’ve returned to the psychedelic sixties – now I wonder what the strung-out would have thought of that collection – heavy man.