Angela Palmer

2020: the Sphere that Changed the World
and The Spike
^{_{Special exhibition
18 May – 19 September 2021}}

Two powerful and beautiful artworks, created as the coronavirus pandemic began to grip the world, and based on the first genomic map of SARS-CoV-2 from Wuhan, China.

2020 was conceived as the coronavirus pandemic began to grip the world. The sculpture is Angela Palmer’s three-dimensional ‘drawing’ of the virus that causes COVID-19, and is based on the first genomic map of SARS-CoV-2 from Wuhan, China.

As the pandemic spread, Palmer was struck by how our understanding of the virus shifted and challenged even the greatest scientific minds. The result of months of careful work and collaboration with scientists, 2020 captures the virus at eight million times its real size, seen suspended and imprisoned in glass.

The installation is an eerie and ethereal rendering of the virus. From the front of the sculpture you are confronted by the entire sphere, with its spike proteins emerging from the surface. Yet as you pass around, it disappears entirely from view, only to reappear again, echoing the elusive behaviour of the virus as it continues to spread across the world.

Palmer’s work sits at the interface between science and art, and in this case has drawn directly on modelling by Dmitry Korkin, Professor of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in the USA. Korkin and his team, together with Professor Siewert-Jan Marrink at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, mapped the whole coronavirus particle sphere.

Palmer faced the challenge of translating the vast and complex data into cross-sections, which she painstakingly engraved onto 28 sheets of glass, stacked together to form the sphere.

‘When I saw the virus in its entirety for the first time, suspended in its glass chamber, I was taken aback by its beauty. It seemed in direct contradiction to the nature of this menace, which has terrorised us all, and continues to do so. The invisible enemy, as we know it, was suddenly rendered tangible, trapped, while the whole of mankind is trapped by it.’
Angela Palmer

2020: the Sphere that Changed the World
_{by Angela Palmer, 2020

Engraved glass plates}
Created in collaboration with Professor Dmitry Korkin, based on the first genomic map of coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 from Wuhan, China.
Edition 1

A glowing sphere on a plinth in a darkened room

2020: The Sphere that Changed the World, on display at Oxford University Museum of Natural History

Side view of several sheets of glass with a distorted glowing form witing

Side view of 2020.

An illuminated, wiry-shaped form etched into multiple sheets of glass against a black background

The Spike by Angela Palmer

The Spike by Angela Palmer, viewed from the side

The Spike
_{Angela Palmer, 2020
Engraved glass plates}
Created in collaboration with Professor Dmitry Korkin and based on the genomic map of the virus identified in Wuhan, China.
Edition 2

The Spike is a delicate glass sculpture representation of the spike protein from the SARS-CoV-2 virus particle. Spike proteins are stalked bumps that protrude from the surface of the coronavirus sphere and latch onto cells in the host’s body. Under a microscope, the spikes may have the appearance of a crown over the surface of the virus, giving the virus its name: ‘corona’ is Latin for crown.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, co-developed by Professor Sarah Gilbert and researchers here at the University of Oxford, contains the genetic sequence of this spike protein. When the vaccine enters our cells, our immune system responds by generating antibodies to the spike protein, which can then be used to attack the real coronavirus, if there is a later infection.

After display here in the Museum, The Spike will be donated by the artist to Professor Sarah Gilbert and her team at the University of Oxford, who worked on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.

About the Artist, Angela Palmer

Angela Palmer has sculptures in the permanent collections of several major institutions worldwide, including her reconstruction of a 2,000-year-old Egyptian child mummy as a three-dimensional drawing on glass in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and a sculpture representing an area of space using Nasa data for the Kepler mission which is in The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, Washington. She has further sculptures in The National Galleries of Scotland; the Wellcome Trust; The Royal College of Physicians; The Royal Papworth; and Oxford University. Sir John Leighton, director of The National Galleries Scotland, selected one her works in his book 100 Masterpieces of the National Galleries of Scotland (‘Brain of the Artist.’)

The three-dimensional presentation of cross-sectional data is a technique the artist adapted while studying anatomy as a student at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University. Palmer was inspired by a laboratory model demonstrating the structure of penicillin exhibited in the History of Science Museum in Oxford, which was made in the 1940s by the Nobel laureate Dame Dorothy Hodgkin. She went on to create anatomical works derived from MRI and CT scans, which can be found on her website www.angelaspalmer.com.

Palmer was previously a journalist, whose career included the editorship of The Observer Magazine and Elle Magazine.