This body of work is based on archival material relating to my mother, Olive Elizabeth Aykroyd and is a homage to what she gave and taught me. Olive was born in 1913 in Dublin and was exceptional in many ways. She studied Natural Sciences at Trinity College Dublin in the 1930s from where she obtained a PhD in 1938 when it was unusual for a woman to acheive such things. After she got married and had children she did not return to her research. I grew up knowing little about her early life.
When she died, I inherited her old brass microscope and laboratory slides which have always intrigued me. Having researched her early life I have been using the archive as a rich source of ideas, re-presenting and re-interpreting the original materials in a variety of ways - from cyanotypes, to reprinting the slides of larvae onto huge pieces of tracing paper, to manipulating the images in Photoshop to produce a homage to Andy Warhol to decorating ceramic tiles with the slide images, to using the slides to make cyanotypes.
I have also been using my camera as a type of microscope, taking macro images of details of plants.
Under the Microscope will be exhibited at the Guildhall Library, London from 19th March until 16th May. Please see Events page for the link.