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“Sometimes I’m just sitting at my microscope and I just realise how beautiful it is, what I do,” she says.
This year’s competition is being judged by fashion designer Lisa Gorman, who studied nursing and worked at The Royal Melbourne Hospital before switching to fashion.
This red heart depicts the atomic structure of a COVID-19 virus protein. The white cluster inside it is a drug-like molecule that prevents the virus from replicating.Credit:Dr Marija Dramicanin, Associate Professor Peter Czabotar and Ahmed Wardak/WEHI
The attraction of the images is “deeper than the aesthetic” appeal, she says. “There’s intrigue around what you’re seeing, what you’re experiencing, and what it’s made of.
“Beauty is definitely held within these works.”
The colours in the images are added by researchers to draw out information and structure. The neon aesthetic resonates with Gorman.
“They took me back to the ’90s, some of them looked like a rave party,” she said. “There was this organic movement with this neon pop colour against a black background.”
The wavy landscape of cells in our intestines.Credit:Wang Cao/WEHI
Gorman jokes the scientists might want to update their palette: ideally, this season’s scientific data “could go with a bit of forest green spliced with mint, we could get some violet and cobalt blue, lilac and mustard yellow”.
“I could always lend them my Pantone books.”
Then again, maybe they’re on to something.
“That [neon rave] palette is on the rise again,” says Gorman. “They’re probably ahead of the times. We probably need their help more than they need ours.”
The rods represent blood vessels, and the spheres depict the point where the vessels branch off into new ones. An error in Dr Lachlan Whitehead’s code in the making of this image led to this “beautiful but jumbled chaos,” he says.Credit:Dr Lachlan Whitehead/WEHI
And seriously, Gorman is taking inspiration from the experience back to her mood boards. She’s intensely interested in the use of photographic imagery in fashion, with new technologies that can get more detailed imagery onto fabrics.
“That was really inspiring, to see photographic texture at that micro level, to dig down into it,” she says.
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She’s not exactly announcing that the next Gorman range will be Toxoplasma-themed, but there’s a long history of the fashion world nicking designs from the natural world, on a much more subtle level than a leopard print or python-skin pattern.
“You find textures within such tiny elements sometimes, and that in itself can create a whole textile print.”
Art and fashion and science speak to each other more than we realise, says Gorman.
“There is so much to explore.”