This is my representation of prions through visual art. What I decided to do was portray the progression of abnormal prions from first entering the cell body to after a significant amount of time passes. As you can tell from the ink drawing, the prion first starts off as one abnormally folded one, just meandering through the space of normal prion proteins. But then, as time passes and it latches onto one prion protein, it spreads like wildfire and the entire area becomes covered with abnormal prion proteins.
I really enjoyed Daniela’s lecture as well as the ink drawing project she proposed. It’s not only because she’s my actual art professor for one of my current classes this semester, but because through the ink drawing project, we were able to take a concrete subject matter and turn it into something abstract. And because it’s abstract, each member of the audience (as well as the actual artist) can have different interpretations of the art, and in that way, we’re putting ourselves in the shoes of the scientists who proposed all those various theories about the prions. Due to the fact that the concept is still fairly new and foreign, scientists are still trying to figure out what is actually happening and how these prions function, which is in a sense what we were attempting to do through our art: understand the abstract.
I also really enjoyed the talk about space that Daniela gave us. Although we’ve been learning a lot of this during my drawing class, it still struck me as to how much art is not just about the actual depiction of the subject, but also how the surroundings of it are depicted as well.