material feminisms + tiny tools

Reading right now:
      Alaima, Stacy and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 2008.

To quote, "Focusing exclusively on representations, ideology, and discourse [of the body] excludes lived experience, corporeal practice, and biological substance from consideration. It makes it nearly impossible for feminism to engage with medicine or science in innovative, productive or affirmative ways--the only path available is the well-worn path of critique." (p4)

So far here, we're talking about the way in which feminism has wedged the body from itself through an exclusive focus on discourse and language about the body. It's as if a distance has resulted from the production of a narrative around the thing that ignores its thing-ness, and instead turns it into a cerebral product. Feminist materialism aims to fix this dilemma.

My miniature looms and weaving tools printed on Stelarc's 3D printer.

I do situate the work that I'm doing here at SymbioticA as feminist materialist work. I'm bringing decorative craft (weaving, etc) to the pitre dish, in the lab. My research is guided by both a hypothesis: that different textile structures can affect the structural integrity of organic bone growth, as well as guided by aesthetics--the aesthetics of science with all its sterility, labware and microscopy, as well as the aesthetics of the domestic, with all its beautifying, messiness and labour/physicality. Laboriously weaving a cozy cloth on a miniature loom and immersing it in a pink nutrient liquid in an incubator, handcrafting natural dyestuffs in the kitchen and bringing them into the lab for experimentation with tissue growth, working traditional textile materials such as silk yarn into laboratory practice for not only its profound scientific implications but also for its traditional, cultural aesthetic associations with femininity, finery and rarity--these are all my methods for integrating science into a feminist-oriented, textile-based art practice and vice versa. Ultimately, it is all about crafting the body or a disembodied, abstracted part of it, in the most physical way possible. It is entirely feasible that I could implant one of my woven bone structures into my own body and have it fuse with my skeleton. We would only see it through x-rays. That is perhaps a final stage manifestation of this project. Anyway, I haven't even touched yet on the idea of enacting pseudo-motherhood in the lab, as I foster orphan cell children, keep them warm and feed and watch them grow, speculate on their behavior and attempt to influence them and what they'll become.

The smallest crochet hook you'll ever see. Printed on Stelarc's 3D printer.

I'm not the very first to merge biology and domesticity/textile craft. One artist I reference quite often is Dr Catherine Fargher. She's blended storytelling, biological practice and performance into artistic pieces that bring the realm of the domestic to the lab, and then to the gallery or playhouse. I believe she coined the term 'mutated narrative', which I like to use often. Her paper, Evolution, Mutation and Hybridity in Bio-Performance Practice: Wet Biology and Hybrid Arts in the Performance/ Installation BioHome—The Chromosome Knitting Project was a definitive text for my preparatory work last semester.

You can see darker areas on the yarn where it pulled apart.

Today I dyed a sterile silk skein (a very small one) with sterile-filtered eucalyptus bark dye concentrate. The dye was filtered directly into a pitre dish, using tiny syringe filters under the flow hood, and the silk added. The silk was extremely resistant to liquid, having been steamed at 120˚C in the autoclave. However, eventually the dye did saturate the yarn after I poked at it for a while with lab tweezers. Then into the incubator it went for two hours. I couldn't add mordant to the dye because ultimately, I want cells to live and grow on this yarn and a mordant is the same as a fixative for cells - it kills them. The dye, however, I think will be extremely helpful in the cell cultures as I learned today that eucalyptus has antibacterial properties, meaning it will help my cell cultures from becoming contaminated. This could be a medical breakthrough! Ha, we will see what happens.
What I unfortunately discovered in this process, is that the autoclave temperatures are too much for the silk. It broke down the fibres by creating 'hot spots' on the yarn, which I only discovered after I applied the eucalyptus dye (the hot spots showed up darker than the rest of the yarn). After the yarn was dry, I tested its strength and it just simply pulled apart. Not useful for weaving. So, back to square one. I'll make new skeins, scour them in sodium carbonate again and sterilize them by other means - with ethanol perhaps. Autoclave is out.

I also dyed some decellularized hog gut, which shriveled and puckered in the pitre dish because of the tannins in the dye, creating a natural tie-dye effect on the tissue. It took the dye quite hungrily, sucking up the colour and hanging onto it. I'll spread that tissue onto glass slides and have a look under the microscope to see what effect it had on a cellular level. If there are still cells left on my decellularized tissue, it should show them up, or show something up.

My bone soup is growing crystals again, which means there is a problem somewhere, either with the pH of the media or with the incubator. I'll have to figure this out before I go ahead and thaw my mouse osteoblasts, because I don't want to kill these cells - they're pretty much my last hope for successful bone growth. All of my other cell cultures died because of the disaster with the warm water bath becoming a hot tub and cooking my media. Ooooof, that's a month and a half of work totally down the drain, and my beautiful Saint-Henry-the-cat-who-got-me-the-rat cells are a story that turned to its last page. However, this is how it is working with life materials. Unpredictable! I have a few C2C12s left, but they're struggling. Tomorrow I also get my 3T3 cell cultures to play with, and I need some good media for those. So, tomorrow will be about making more soup. This time, I really have to get it right. I could also try some more primary sourcing, but that would mean going to an abattoir to get FRESH dead bodies. I might also be able to get something from the morgue.

Also, today I met Sruli Recht, an artist who was visiting from Iceland and who is considering coming to do a residency at SymbioticA. You can check out his work here: http://srulirecht.com - one of the things he's done is to make a band ring from his own flesh, taking the skin from his stomach. He showed me where the chunk of flesh was taken from on his body today. The image of the flesh ring he designed is here: http://srulirecht.com/228259/2558967/all-things/forget-me-knot. I told Sruli that I was thinking of a residency in Iceland next and he told me he would have some contacts.

joining history + denatured soup

My rat bone cells have been growing, one at a time, slowly, slowly. Here are some new images from the digital microscope last week:

This is possibly a cell dividing.

Little beauties. I'm just in love with them.
Here are some of Paloma's sketches for what she's thinking about with animating the cells. I think she's got sea life on the brain, too.

Paloma Dawkins.

Paloma Dawkins.

Last week I picked up a cryovial of frozen mouse osteoblast cells from PhD student, Audrey Chan at the QEII Medical Centre, School of Surgery, Centre for Orthopaedic Research, UWA. It was an amazing experience, because Audrey took the time to sit down with me and explain her process of primary sourcing bone cells from rodent femora (long bones). I will thaw the cells this week.

Also, I recently thawed some very special cells - the last cryovial of pig osteoblasts, from a project that Oron Catts did 13 years ago, called Pig Wings. So, the cells I thawed and plated (meaning put them in cell media in pitre dishes) were in a deep -80˚ sleep for the last decade and a half, almost.

Once I've successfully cultured these two types of osteoblasts, I will use some for my project and then I will also freeze some down, so that future SymbioticA projects can use them. There is something awe-inspiring about being a part of the continuation of life in this way - it almost makes me like family. I threw out almost all of my first attempts at culturing bone cells from a primary source (from the cow bones I got at the butcher) because nothing was left living in the dishes. So, now I'm down to about 25 culture dishes that I'm maintaining. I had a lab disaster last night that has threatened all of my cultures now, but I'll talk about that in a minute.

I picked up my 3D printed miniature looms yesterday from Stelarc's lab, and it was a delight to see them come out of the wax! Some of the models failed while others turned out perfectly. The problem with the failed objects is that when I scaled them down from human size to cell culture size, the proportions made the objects too thin in areas and they just didn't hold up. Important lesson in designing for 3D printing. I haven't taken any photos of the miniature looms and weaving tools yet because I still need to clean the remainder of the wax support off of them. I haven't quite figured out the best way to do that, but I'll try 100% ethanol. 

I've been developing my own protocols as I go along in all these experiments, and now have a binder stacked with protocols for everything from preparing silk for tissue culturing to preparing eucalyptus for dyeing tissue to feeding cells to microscopy, etc - I've got about 20 lab protocols now, a blend of science and textile methods. Today I boiled little silk skeins in a 2000ml flask in ultrapure H2O and sodium carbonate. I boiled them in fresh solution twice to remove all of the sericin and industrial chemical residue. The first water, after boiling for 2 hours was quite cloudy and yellowed, and the second one was a bit cleaner. Then I dried them overnight in a laminar flow hood (sterile conditions), and they are now double-bagged and sealed in autoclave bags to be autoclaved in 120˚C steam, to make them completely sterile for working with, in the lab. 

Filtering eucalyptus dyes. Mucky business.

Filtering eucalyptus dyes in the lab.

I realized while doing this work that labware is so perfect for working with fibre. Heat resistant glass beakers and flasks are amazing for cooking fibre in liquid, and a magnetic stirrer and hot plate does most of the work. Also, they are marked with measurements - very convenient. The highest setting on the hot plate brings liquids to a perfect, gentle, low boil and maintains it, so you can walk away and leave it. I'm really surprised more textile dye labs are not set up with scientific labware, they're such well designed utilitarian objects, which look cool, too. Easy to clean, stain resistant and durable (pretty smash-proof). I know what I'll have in my studio when I set up a permanent one again, post-grad school.

So, the disaster that happened last night was a cause of great anxiety, and a whole lot of work today. It was a result of working in a shared lab space: someone (I don't know who) turned the warm water bath up to 70˚C and left it like that. The warm water bath is supposed to be set at body temperature (37˚C) for warming up cell culture media to use in your culture dishes, to feed your cells. I went into the lab and set up everything I needed to feed my cells at the end of the day yesterday. I put three different flasks of various cell media in the warm water bath, turned it on and left the lab for 20 minutes while the UV light sterilized the flow hood. When I came back, I discovered the warm water bath steaming like a hot tub and all of my media cooking in it, nearly bursting its plastic flasks and popping the lids off them. It was a big WHAT THE FUCK?? moment. Basically, my media was ruined, the proteins in it all denatured (which means cooked and no longer fresh and usable by cells, basically). I had no choice but to feed the denatured media to my cultures, since they were starving, and deal with the fallout today. 

Most of my day today consisted of running around gathering the chemicals to make new bone soup and regular D-10 (the standard cell medium). The majority of my C2C12s died. There are some left, but it'll be a long road to recovery now that they're sitting back in the right medium. I couldn't even bear to look at the marrow cells yet. I'll inspect those later under the digital microscope to be sure of what I'm looking at. Pray with me to Saint Henry, for survivors. Making bone soup completely on my own was nerve-wracking but I managed to do it, with a little help from Stuart. I love that man. Oron was home with his sick daughter and Ionat is out of the country, so I was really on my own with all of this. Once again, I had a chance to empower myself by getting tough work done in the lab using my own wits and whatever resources I could find. So, I have new bone soup, a whole fresh batch. Thankfully I still have one vial of frozen cells to make use of!

Boxes full of cryovials of cells, being brought up from liquid nitrogen.

  

Since my last post, amazing things have happened.
I've been awarded a very generous international artist-in-residence grant from artsnb (the New Brunswick Arts Board). This enabled me to close my crowd funding campaign, because my budget is now at exactly the amount it ideally needed to be for this project. Previous to this, I was coasting on the absolute bare minimum that I needed to be here. What a relief it was to receive word that I was selected for this grant! The New Brunswick Arts Board has been absolutely phenomenal in supporting my art career over the past 13 years, just when I need support the most. We New Brunswick artists are very lucky to have this resource. The things I will be able to do now at SymbioticA will be quite extraordinary.

More good news, too - I have a bone cell! : 



This, my friends, is my very first viable bone cell!
ISN'T IT BEAUTIFUL? It looks sort of like a hummingbird. This is from the rat bone marrow that I extracted from the rat that Henry the cat caught for me. Henry, my hero. The cell is the splatted thing on the left. The ghostly-looking splat stuff is the cell's cytoplasm, which has spread out and adhered itself to the bottom of the pitre dish, meaning that this cell is healthy and growing. The luminous thing on the bottom right with the tentacles is likely another cell as well, but it's unclear how healthy it is because only the nucleus is visible and no cytoplasm. So, it may be dying... or maybe it will grow. I'll know in a few days. If you look back to the splat, you can see a similarly sized nucleus in it, a white roundish thing that is underneath another layer of cell stuff. The long tendrils that reach out into the nothingness are the cell's way of networking with other cells, and when they join, the begin to form a colony, which is what I want. It was a joyous day the day I discovered this cell under the microscope! Just imagine me, like a space explorer, searching the empty universe for life, day after day, to one day stumble across this! No small accomplishment, let me tell you. Primary sourcing cells from recently dead tissue is very, very difficult. My other cell cultures are doing nothing and will just have to be thrown out. I've been struggling to work with this technique because I discovered that ordering cell lines from a supplier is much more expensive than I first imagined: the cell lines themselves are around $500-$700, but with the shipping, it's a total expense of about $2000. $2000 for a bunch of frozen cells in a miniscule vial, shipped in a box kept at -80˚. If it continues to grow and multiply, I will eventually be able to spin down and freeze my own vial of osteoblasts, and save them for later or allow someone else at SymbioticA in the future to use them, contributing to the ongoing research there. When I looked at this cell today with my naked eye through the microscope, it was glowing and radiant. A stunning, inspiring communion with the force of life, through just a single cell.

3D printed scans of Stelarc's arm with the ear implant.

Other exciting things I've been doing include 3D printing miniature looms on Stelarc's amazing, fancy 16micron 3D printer. Stelarc needs no introduction, as far as I'm concerned but just in case: He's the artist who has an ear implanted in his arm, and it's been there since about 2006 or so. He's internationally famous in the BioArt world. He's an amazing, generous man, and is a professor at Curtin University in Perth. He's been teaching me how to use his extremely sophisticated (best in the world) 3D printer so that I can use it to print objects for my bone project.

So, I'm printing looms for weaving. Each loom is approximately 3cm x 3cm, and I've printed some miniature loom tools as well, like shuttles and needles. The looms so far are different models of simple frame and peg looms, which will allow me to weave basic cloths. I will get more elaborate with printing and assembling looms after I experiment with these ones, perhaps even print a full floor loom model in miniature and assemble it. Why the miniature looms?

My newest research has led me to discover that silk fibre is not only compatible with human biological systems (meaning the body and cells like it, it will break down in the body over time and it's even been used successfully in bone grafts already), but it also carries "indicators" that communicate with bone cells about how to differentiate, meaning it basically has programming for bone cells on each silk filament. What this means is that you don't have to use a special differentiation medium, like bone soup, to grow osteoblasts. The silk will tell them what to do, so you can grow osteoblasts in regular old cell medium. If this isn't the most radical and incredible thing ever, I don't know what is. Mind = blown. I ordered unspun silk filament thread and will weave some into miniature cloths and then will insert the entire loom with the cloth still on it into a pitre dish and culture cells on it. Imagine how amazing this will be! I'm also going to weave some of my decellularized intestine on it, as well as surgical sutures (which, by the way, are either made out of SILK or GUT). I have ample sutures waiting to be used, and will begin prepping my silk yarns tomorrow. I pick up my printed looms from Stelarc on Friday and then start weaving. I also printed some already woven structures, like a woven ball and a basket weave, to try them out in culture dishes as well, to see what happens. I'm not sure if cells will grow on that kind of polymer or not, because it's not organic (so probably not). Ultimately, I'm hoping not, because I want my cells to just grow in the shape of the cloths I weave, not the looms. I will post pics of my miniature looms once I have them. Here are some of the things that Stelarc has printed as experiments for himself:

A 3D printed, functioning miniature bike chain. He gave me this as a gift.

A 3D printed, functioning miniature wrench.

I was also amazed and delighted to discover that preparing silk for a cell culture is exactly the same as prepping it for dyeing: washing in boiling water with soda ash for 1 hour, 2x. The only difference is that I'll dry the silk in a fume hood that's turned on overnight and autoclave it (cook it in extremely high temperature steam) to kill absolutely everything that might possibly contaminate it. Tonight, I am making my own soda ash (or sodium carbonate). I discovered that you can do this by simply putting baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) in the oven at 200˚C for 1 hour. Ta-dah, you have soda ash. It's just fantastic how much of my tissue engineering work is a combination of science, kitchen witchery and textile know-how. This particular aspect of things thrills me.

My eucalyptus dye, before (left) and after (right) adding mordant.

Some of my bone slides being stained.

Speaking of dyeing, I've been playing with my eucalyptus bark dye, prepared as an histological stain for tissue sections on glass slides. I also dyed a shirt with it. It stained the tissue on the microscopic slides exactly the same as the cotton shirt, but interestingly enough, I didn't have to use a mordant on the shirt to get it to hold the dye, whereas I did have to add a mordant in the lab to get it to properly dye the bone and other tissue sections on the slides. Bone seems particularly hard to dye. There are plenty of mordants in the lab, as well as oxidizers which help catalyze the dye. I used sodium iodate to oxidize the eucalyptus, as well as iron as a mordant. It worked well. However, the dye liquor was not really as saturated as it could have been and so everything I used it on turned a light coffee colour. I'd like it darker, so I'll boil down the liquor more and saturate the dye/stain.

This bloody gash is eucalyptus sap.

I've also learned more about the mixing and uses of histological stains, such as haematoxylin, which is a natural stain derived from the heart of haematoxylin wood. Haematoxylin stains the nuclei of cells black. Other stains (both natural and chemical) will stain different types of tissue, such as collagen. So, I've experimented with a number of these and now have a beautiful box of glass slides of tissues that I've sliced, dyed and mounted myself. They are treasures. Again, I will post more photos of those later when I have some. What I discovered about the eucalyptus dye was that it didn't discriminate between tissue types - it just dyed everything a coffee brown. I was hoping to make some great eucalyptus lab discovery, but alas...

Macro shot of eucalyptus sap, which looks remarkably like the potassium ferricyanide crystals I was growing, here: http://ossificatorium.wordpress.com/photo-gallery/

OK, here are my C2C12s now, differentiated into multiple nuclei cells (versus cells with one nuclei) - you can see them form longer, stretched out cells now. You can also see the cytoplasm around some of them. I told my peeps at SymbioticA today that I'm about as good at feeding and maintaining cells (which need to be fed every two days) as I am at watering plants and looking after animals, meaning kind of not really. These guys just got fed after five days. I'll try to do better!

Mighty Mouse cells!

And, my entire assortment of tissue cultures in the incubator at present - that's a lot of hungry cells: