When Colleen McAllister’s grandfather passed away, she received an unusual inheritance: glass slides that he had used to identify and verify cultures when he was a microbiologist in New York from the 1950s to the 1970s. Taking the slides to an old print shop, she had them scanned and digitized. Then she took her fascination a step further and manipulated them in Photoshop to create distinct, abstract cellular designs.
A former film and TV executive and animation veteran who is now a Story Editor and Head Writer on Nickelodeon’s Zokie Sparkleby, McAllister takes great pleasure is sharing what she calls her “wacky-science-art.” Not only does it give her the opportunity to stretch her creativity, but it also allows her grandfather’s work to live on in a new medium: digital prints on premium, high-resolution, semi-glossy paper. Among the pieces she has created, Blue is one of her favorites. Taking this microscopic view of one common form of human nocardial disease—pneumonia—she digitally colored it and manipulated the contrasts and highlights so that it appears lit from behind. “To me, it looks like the face of a moon from a far distant galaxy,” she says.
McAllister notes how living through a pandemic has caused each of us to exist with disease front-and-center in our daily lives. “While it’s invisible, we know we’re in its presence,” she says. “The wisest among us respect its power.” She considers her art a way to show her respect as well as capture the contradictory nature of disease, which she calls “powerful yet ethereal, real yet intangible.”
More of McAllister’s microbiology inspired artwork can be found at her Etsy shop, The Abstract Biologist.
