Art Project: Microbes Rule the World
Title: Microbes Rule the World
By: Samantha Pershing
Media: I used fine tipped markers to complete this project.
Artist’s Statement: During this semester I have really gotten an appreciation for how much microbes impact the world. Without microbes completing the nitrogen and carbon cycle, creating nutrients for other organisms, or even cleaning up after our mistakes, the world could not function as it does now. I wanted to make a project that really showed this. For my art project, I used pointillism (where you use dots to create a picture [i.e. no lines]) to draw a scene that you would look at when you are first looking into a microscope through the eyepieces, and both of your eyes are still seeing two different parts of the picture. I wanted to use pointillism to symbolize microbes, even though microbes are not always coccus. I drew on one side of the picture a Gram stain that my bacterium, Staphylococcus aureus, created that reminded me of a picture of a flower. The other side was a drawing of the world. I wanted this drawing to symbolize a few key concepts. One, the microbes that we identified in our projects all have their own unique place in the world. They are all not just bacteria in a petri dish, but microbes that affect how this world functions. That is why the two scenes are overlapping. And two, I wanted to depict that we do not know everything about the world. There are so many different aspects that are still a mystery. Therefore, I made the world sort of breaking out of its confinement to signify this. Overall, I am really happy with how this picture turned out, and I hope you guys like it too.
Credit: I used the Earth picture from this website as a template for my Earth: https://sos.noaa.gov/datasets/blue-marble-without-clouds/
Also, here is my picture that I took of Staphylococcus aureus:
