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Carol Vorderman's brain is a
work of art
By Roger
Highfield
(Filed: 28/11/2003)
It is a brain that has won much admiration for the
speed and dexterity with which it solves mathematical sums on the
quiz show Countdown. Now Carol Vorderman's grey matter has been
turned into a work of art and is to go on show.
Eerie glass representations of the contents of the
presenter's head have resulted from an unusual collaboration between
artist Angela Palmer and scientist Dr Mark Lythgoe, inspired by a
competition run by The Telegraph.
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Carol Vorderman examines her glass brain
scan |
The telvision celebrity agreed to allow Dr Lythgoe
and colleagues at University College London to scan her brain to
promote a lecture series run by The Telegraph and the healthcare
company Novartis, and funded by the National Endowment for Science,
Technology and the Arts, Nesta.
When she read about the experiments on Carol's brain,
Miss Palmer contacted Dr Lythgoe because she has been developing a
way to create art from scans.
In Carol's case, she etched and marked a series of
slices though her brain, taken by the UCL team, on to a stack of
glass plates. "I love the end results," said Dr Lythgoe.
"They represent the topography of Carol's mind. I am
particularly interested by the ethereal effect of the fragile lines
within the solid-but-transparent form, and the spiritual quality of
the empty space within which the image seems to float," said Miss
Palmer.
"Carol was desperate to know how large her brains
were, and was thrilled when I told her they were enormous," she
added.
"Amazing," said the presenter, on inspecting the
glass versions of her brain for the first time yesterday. She added
that she looked forward to having one lit up on her mantlepiece at
home.
The result, along with images of Angela Palmer's own
brain and that of a convicted murderer, are being shown tonight at
at private view in The Fine Art Society in London, before public
display tomorrow. One of Carol's brains has already been sold, said
Patrick Bourne, managing director.
The inspiration for creating this three dimensional
effect came from an exhibit made in 1942 by Britain's only female
Nobel prizewinner, Dorothy Hodgkin, said Miss Palmer, who studies at
The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford.
"She presented the crystal salts of penicillin by
drawing contour lines on horizontal perspex sheets, held together by
steel bolts."
The scans of Carol's brain were made at UCL's
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience by Prof Brian Butterworth and Dr
Lythgoe using a method called magnetic resonance imaging. |
