Cell Sketches

Imaging a cell almost always involves transforming it through contact with molecules, pigments, and fluorescent proteins. By the time it is ready to be visualized with a microscope, the cell is already an image, a substrate upon which a new structure has been chemically imprinted.

Cell Sketches considers the cell-as-image in cell and developmental biology and the traditions of histology and intaglio printmaking. It draws on print as a means of communication foundational to the history of biology and itself a representation of the process of making tissues visible. In transforming digital microscopy images into print, Cell Sketches also challenges the reductionism of quantification, returning the numerated pixels of the digital image back to the material entanglement from which they came.

An edition of Cell Sketches was printed with Janis Stemmermann at Russell Janis Studio in 2018.