Art Project: Micro Magnets
by Emily Reast
For this project I’ve made a series of color coded clay magnets representing different types of microbes. I want to show that microbial life can be interesting, presenting diversity, and that it can be beautiful (even if I’m not the best artist). The green magnets represent bacteria, the blue yeast (fungi), the orange and red viruses, and the purples archaea. I’ve included some features such as flagella and pili on several of the magnets to make them appear slightly more realistic. Of course the different microbes are not accurate in their relative size to each other, but I had limited resources and didn’t want to make any of the art actually be microscopic. Furthermore, the quality of being magnetic allows the microbes to change orientations and colony formation on the surface to which they stick. The photo attached to this post is the magnets stuck to my dorm room door here on campus. 
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