art and biomed, displays/exhibits, recent biomed
Assembling a glass sculpture of ATP-synthase by Colin Rennie
One of the great attractions here at Medical Museion right now is Colin Rennie’s glass sculpture of ATP-synthase.
We have placed it in the basement area to the left of the main entrance — we didn’t dare put it on the ground floor because we were afraid the 18th century wooden floor construction would collapse under the 900 780 kilograms of assembled glass plates. It’s lit by a single spotlight which gives the small and dark room a crypt-like ambience, and increases the presence of the sculpture. An object of secular awe.
Below Colin is polishing one of the 30 glass plates measuring 1×1 meter. You can see how the structure of the sculpture is made out of nothing, i.e., holes in the glass plates made by a water jet stream cutter:
And below Colin and Jim Patton are putting the sculpture together, one plate on top of the other:
And finally, Colin presents the work to our student guides (docents):
16 Feb 2009 Thomas
It is not clear what the sculpture is. Are the plates from the X-ray pattern? How does the sculpture relate to the current model of the F1Fo particle?
Wow this is incredible!
My only question, as Richard asked above, what exactly is the glass suppose to represent?
Yes, the plates are etched on the basis of the x-ray pattern. I don’t know precisely how it relates to the F1Fo model, just that Colin’s aim was to make a sculpture that reflects the dynamics of the molecule. Colin should know, contact him here: http://glassresearch.sunderland.ac.uk/research-projects/research-staff/colin-rennie
And a small correction: each plate “only” weighs about 26 kilograms, not 30.
Hello all.
Thanks for the interest in the work. it is great to hear feedback.
to answer the questions above. the work is based on the
1QO1 MOLECULAR ARCHITECTURE OF THE ROTARY MOTOR IN ATP SYNTHASE FROM YEAST MITOCHONDRIA
published in 1999
by Stock, D., Leslie, A.G.W., Walker, J.E.
I used this as the most resolved model with the right amount of detail. The stator and the unsolved parts of the molecule are not represented. This model was chosen for its complexity over the earlier fourier maps. It has been translated through various applications and finally rebuilt as a series of NURBS spheres one per atom that intersected with the planes, a Boolean difference operation has then been used to generate holes in the virtual sheets, these have been averaged, and turned into something resembling a stencil, then each sheet imported into the waterjet machine and nested for cutting, so I have had to alter the format of the information quite considerably so as to make this idea work, but have attempted as much as possible to keep the science as accurate as I could, by minimizing disturbance of positions of the atoms used however approximately half of the atoms are not represented.
I do not intend the work to be a model of the molecule. it is not intended to be an aid to understanding the structure of ATPase. More a sculpture responding to some of the conceptual and philosophical questions surrounding humanities search for understanding and our need to see and to construct models of the phenomena we are investigating.
The monumentality of the scale of the work is important also. it is deliberately one meter cubed, as this is the central measurement, close to human scale and fairly close to the mean of the between subatomic and cosmic and a reference for most spacial measurement. A meter cubed is also a sculptural scale, one that effects the viewer physically and occupies a volume that a human can relate directly to.
The glass does not represent anything explicitly, it it a vehicle for the image and the material properties are chosen to cloud the view in both the limited transparency of the standard normal iron float glass and the reflections generated in between the sheets. The gaps between the glass deliberately introduce these reflections to add a haze or a halo around the object. It is intended to be difficult to see detail internally, it is not about detail it is more about complexity, about what is and what is not fathomable by human thought. Semantically I wanted the image to appear ghostly, as if it was hardly there, a trace, something mysterious a metaphor for vision, and understanding.
I hope that goes some way to an explanation
Kind regards
Colin Rennie
Thank you, Colin, for this comment. That’s very helpful. I’ll quote it on our Danish Blog (www.museionblog.dk) as well, to help visitors to the exhbition.
Amazing stuff Colin, found this surfing the net for people from Uni.
I don’t know precisely how it relates to the F1Fo model, just that Colin’s aim was to make a sculpture that reflects the dynamics of the molecule.
[...] Colin Rennie’s glass sculpture of ATP synthase: visual artist Luke Jerram and glassblower Brian Jones have created these two non-coloured glass [...]
that structure is incredible