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Wellcome Trust, January 3, 2012:

The first Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize.

Winner of the professional category Penny Sarchet, Doctoral research student, Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford.

Who inspires you?

I’ve done some pieces on Martin Brasier, who’s in the Oxford University Earth Sciences department. He’s interested in the origin of life, and has found one of the earliest and most complex fossils in a loch in Scotland. He’s been a real inspiration. I also enjoyed speaking to Angela Palmer, the artist behind the Ghost Forest project. She heard about the rate at which we’re losing rainforest and it completely transfixed her. She developed the idea to move several huge trees from Ghana to the UK, to show people what we’re losing. Everybody told her that there was no way that she could do it. She did it, but it sounded like a nightmare! It was amazing that she managed it, very inspiring.

http://wellcometrust.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/winning-ways-meet-the-wellcome-trust-science-writing-prize-winners/

Richard Dorment, Daily Telegraph, November 29, 2011:

Nothing is more viscerally moving than the mummy of a two-year-old boy who died of pneumonia during the Roman occupation around 80 AD. The intricately folded linen wrappings inset with gilded studs identify the child as a member of the Greek-speaking community whose funeral practices followed the Roman custom of insetting a painted portrait of the deceased on the surface of the mummy case. Because the deceased here was a child, there was no portrait, so contemporary artist Angelica Palmer has drawn images produced by recent cat-scans of the mummified corpse on to multiple sheets of glass to create a three dimensional representation of what lies underneath the linen wrapping. The result is a ghostly image of great beauty that seems to appear and disappear as you move across the glass panels.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/8921581/Ashmolean-Ancient-Egypt-in-all-its-glory.html

Theresa Thompson, The Oxford Times, December 30, 2011:

But then, at the tail end of these displays of Egyptian antiquity, you come across an ultra-modern piece of sculpture. Oxford artist Angela Palmer’s recreation in glass of a child mummy — displayed alongside the mummy that inspired it — is an absolute scene-stealer.

Equal parts ghost and substance, the tiny collapsed frame of the little boy invoked on multiple panels of glass seems as you move around it to fade away and reform before your very eyes.

To see them lying there together is incredibly moving: the intricately bound mummy of a child who died almost 2,000 years ago when the Romans ruled Egypt, and a work of contemporary art that uniquely and respectfully commemorates him.

Not even the best audio visual screen could do a better job of making a mummy come ‘alive’. The ancient Egyptians devoted a lot of time and effort making sure the dead lived on.

http://www.oxfordtimes.co.uk/leisure/9445292.Egypt__Body_and_soul/?ref=ec

Adrian Hamilton, The Independent, November 28, 2011:

The exhibition ends with the centuries of Greek and Roman domination after Alexander the Great’s conquest. The funerary practices and mummification remain, but the bodies now have wood portraits showing the real faces of the dead – Roman realism superimposed on Egyptian formalism. Beside them is the mummy of a small child and, beside it, a modern sculpture by Angela Palmer, based on CT scans of the two-year-old boy drawn on over 100 sheets of glass to give the full three-dimensional effect. Palmer, the artist who brought the giant Amazonian trees to Trafalgar Square in an installation, here uses contemporary technology to recreate the combination of the human and the eternal that makes Egyptian culture so special, as much today as it was then.

http://www.independent.co.uk/hei-fi/entertainment/ancient-treasures-of-the-ashmolean-6269008.html?origin=internalSearch

Nicol Dynes, Il Sole 24 Ore, November 23, 2011:

Among so many objects of great beauty and inestimable value, the most memorable is in the last room: the mummy of a boy who died aged two between 80 and 120 AC. Experts at University of Oxford have done over 2,500 scans of the little mummy to determine the conditions of the body, the boy’s state of health while alive and the cause of death (pneumonia). A British artist, Angela Palmer, has used the scans to create ink drawings on 111 glass plates which create an extraordinary and moving 3-D representation of the boy. A mix of archeology, science, technology and art which is totally unique and unforgettable. http://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/cultura/2011-11-24/oxford-nuova-museo-dedicata-190731.shtml?uuid=Aa07kMOE

Michael Philo, Artlyst, November 24, 2011:

The galleries move in loosely chronological order, and contribute overall to the ‘Ancient World’ ground floor tour. Despite all the treasures on show, however, the jewel of the Egypt and Nubia gallery is actually a piece of contemporary art – Unwrapped: Story of a Child Mummy (along with its accompanying temporary exhibition in the Cast Gallery). Showcasing some of the latest techniques in medical science CT scanning, harnessed by someone with an inquisitive mind and great curatorial sensibilities, Unwrapped, by artist Angela Palmer, is every historian and sci-fi lover’s dream. The ethereal shape of a two year old child floats in 111 panels of glass, revealing the ‘internal architecture’ of the mummified body that lies next to it. The chance to glimpse upon something forbidden and sacred, a theme that has been set up throughout the rest of the galleries, really is a special moment to end a visit on.

http://www.artlyst.com/articles/angela-palmers-child-of-our-time

http://www.artlyst.com/articles/ashmolean-museum-unearths-egyptian-treasures

Website: www.modbritart.com

Waterhouse & Dodd presented a series of photographs from 16-22 November in the Cork Street gallery and linked to Angela’s Ghost Forest Art Project.

Mrs Moneypenny writes about Ghost Forest and the challenges of bringing it to London.

Read the full article: http://www.ft.com

Ken Russell writes about Ghost Forest, “Angela Palmer’s incredible, once-in-a lifetime cityscape installation”.

Read the full article: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk

Angela Palmer hosts an audio tour of Breathing In – her mission to capture the physical properties of climate change by finding what is thought to be the most polluted air on Earth, and the purest. Breathing In is exhibited at the Wellcome Collection, 20 October – 22 November 2009.

Watch and listen to Angela’s guide of the exhibition: http://news.bbc.co.uk

Website: www.wellcome.ac.uk

“In April 2007 the artist Angela Palmer embarked on a journey to capture the physical properties of climate change. She travelled to the home of the most polluted air on Earth, Linfen in Shanxi Province, China, and to the place with the purest air and water on Earth, Cape Grim on the northwest tip of Tasmania.

The objects from her journey – including white uniforms worn for one day in both locations now contrasting in colour due to levels of air pollution, face cleansers that reveal dirt from the atmosphere, collected air, coal, abandoned sandals – will be showcased at Wellcome Collection as part of ‘Breathing In’, an installation of Angela Palmer’s work.

Angela Palmer spent a week in Linfen, where she collected water and air samples, recovered abandoned objects and captured local social activity through both film and photography. She then travelled directly to Tasmania, where she repeated her itinerary of evidence gathering. In both locations, Palmer chose to wear the stark white uniforms for the duration of one day, providing the environment with a blank canvas onto which the climate could inscribe itself.

Commenting on her experiences of visiting both locations, Angela Palmer said: “In reaching Linfen, described as the world’s ‘hell on earth’, I found it blackened with generations of coal dust. The smell of rotten eggs in the polluted air was at times overwhelming. But the people seemed happier, friendlier and more at ease with their surroundings than their pampered counterparts in the West. In contrast the Tasmanian reserve was daunting. People were hidden from sight behind net curtains. Picket fences surrounded properties, enclosing perfectly manicured gardens. After a few days, I longed for the sense of community so electrifying and absorbing in the streets of Linfen.”

On her return to the UK, she asked a number of scientists to analyse her findings. Microscopic images of collected air particles are presented alongside the primary evidence. These images make distinct what is invisible to the human eye, enabling the artist to “highlight air as the precious commodity of the future”.

While the objects sit in the display case as extracted scientific data, the accompanying film footage transports the viewer to the sights and sounds of two contrasting landscapes. We are reminded of the parallel lives of people living in such extreme conditions. The silence and stillness of Tasmania contrasts greatly with the bustling activity of Linfen, where pollution from its rapidly expanding coal industry is causing an alarming increase in respiratory and cancer-related illnesses.

Since the creation of ‘Breathing In’, climate change has continued to be a central concern of Palmer’s work. For her latest project, ‘Ghost Forest’, she is transporting ten tropical rainforest tree stumps from a commercially logged forest in western Ghana and placing them in Trafalgar Square (16-22 November 2009), the epicentre of Western industrialisation over the past 200 years. Ghost Forest will travel to Copenhagen to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference in December.

James Peto, senior curator at Wellcome Collection comments: “The coincidence of ‘Breathing In’ at Wellcome Collection and the appearance of the artist’s ‘Ghost Forest’ in Trafalgar Square will highlight the extraordinary ingenuity and resourcefulness that Angela Palmer has brought to the challenge of how to engage the wider public with the consequences of climate change.””

Angela explores her motivations and challenges in bringing Ghost Forest to Trafalgar Square and Copenhagen, in conjunction with the U.N. Conference on Climate Change, to express visually the connection between deforestation and climate change.

Read the FT feature: http://www.ft.com