A few years back Rogan Brown moved from London to a remote region of France. "It was an overwhelming experience," he says, "and as an artist I was looking for a way to come to terms with my new environment." Landscape painting seemed too staid, so he started trying to recreate bits of the teeming world around him in paper. Since then, he's gotten pretty good at it.
Outbreak, Brown's latest work, is a tribute to the Human Microbiome Project, an ongoing scientific study of the vast, diverse colonies of bacteria that live inside us. The piece was made for an exhibition organized by the Eden Project, a non-profit that promotes ecologically-related tourism in the UK. "For me as a visual artist the job was to help change public perception of bacteria from something negative and dirty to something that is by and large benign if not crucial for the healthy functioning of our bodies," Brown says.
The artist started by researching bacteria, quickly discovering the "surreal, magical and beautiful world" they make up inside all of us. On one level, the work is a meticulous ode to this fantastic microbial architecture. Layering delicate piece upon delicate piece, Brown manages to convey the exquisite topography out of the most ordinary of materials. At the same time, he wanted the piece to convey "the limitations of science when confronted by the sheer scale of this bacterial world." Hence the colonies sprawling and spilling outside the confines of the petri dish.
In all, the piece took Brown four months to make. There was one month of drawing, two of hand cutting, and one at the end to get everything assembled. "I work these sculptures in the same way as medieval monks worked to illustrate sacred manuscripts," he says. "Slowly and painstakingly--the work itself being a hymn to the thing it is describing."
Tedious work though it may be, Brown can't help but to see paper as the perfect material for the job. "It mixes this incredible level of fragility with toughness," he says. "Which, I came to understand, is a perfect metaphor for nature itself."
