Welcome to G-Lands

Pipette Creature : Emmerson Lab Day 1And so the out-of-body experience begins! As an artist in a scientific laboratory I am like a creature from another planet, an everyday explorer in an exciting new landscape. The language is curiously coded and the equipment spins and shakes like a dance routine on a strange theatrical stage. As I look around I cannot help but marvel at how I arrived here: I’ve found a team of scientists to be my guides on this exploration inside the body. We are encountering the structures of life itself and I’m keen to share these experiences with you.

For the past few months I have been observing and drawing inside a research laboratory, getting up close and personal with the salivary gland. Yes, those special little glands that we never see but are so important for our daily routines of talking, chewing, swallowing, sleeping, and sharing all sorts of social events and intimate moments with our friends and loved ones, like sharing a meal or making love. 

Have you ever thought about the possibility of life without saliva?

I certainly had not until I met Dr Elaine Emmerson, an expert research scientist and team leader at the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine in Edinburgh’s Bio Quarter. Despite being a lifesaving treatment for patients with head and neck cancer, a side-effect of radiotherapy is damage to salivary glands, leading to the chronic condition Xerostomia (dry mouth.) This can severely affect a patient’s quality of life, with existing treatments concentrating only on short-term relief. The work of Dr Elaine Emmerson aims to develop a regenerative strategy to restore salivary function. When Elaine first told me about her lab and their research into the regeneration of the salivary gland, my mouth went dry and my palms became very sweaty thinking about all of the head and neck cancer survivors who were now walking around with little to no saliva. How is this possible? What is this like? And why didn’t I know about it? 

On my first day in the lab I was shown a little sample of human salivary gland tissue in a container (pictured below) and I just couldn’t believe it! I promptly asked if the owner of this gland was alive, a very important piece of information I felt, the answer was yes. How incredible that I, as an artist, or potentially you as a member of the public, could engage with someone else’s body part!? How did it get here? What is life like for the person now walking around without it? Other than the scientists, who else encountered the gland specimen on its journey to arrive in the lab? 

First sighting of Osiris the salivary gland : Emmerson Lab CRMIn order to ask these important questions I feel from here on in we should formally introduce you to the salivary gland. During Pharaonic times, Osiris was the Egyptian god of the afterlife, inundation and re-birth. On this journey we aren’t mapping the flooding of the Nile but the Emmerson Lab at CRM certainly aims to re-flood the mouth, returning salivary function to the many glands living in drought. And so, we have conjured Osiris, our protagonist, our salivary gland, who lives in the G-lands, located everywhere and nowhere all at once. Osiris is your gland and mine. Will you join us on this out-of-body experience?

Together we will witness and observe the journey taken by Osiris, from the time they are removed from the patient, through to the research taking place in Dr. Elaine Emmerson’s laboratory. Osiris and I will meet with patients, surgeons, oncologists, pathologists, research scientists and museum collections, capturing the different scales and perspectives of those who interact with the salivary gland. These interactions and observations will be documented through dialogue, drawing and sculpture. I’ll be sharing this process openly with you, right here and through an exhibition, a publication and a creative learning program in Scotland from 2020 onwards. 

You can be involved initially by interacting with this blog, asking questions of myself, the team of scientists, healthcare professionals and patients, which we will seek to answer. Further down the line you will be able to get involved in various opportunities including talks/panel discussions, exhibitions and hands-on art-science workshops at the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine (CRM) and ASCUS Lab at Summmerhall, Edinburgh. 

Thank you for reading,

Emily

emilyfongstudio@gmail.com

@emilyfongstudio 

• To discover more about Dr Elaine Emmerson’s research you can visit  http://crm.ed.ac.uk/research/group/manipulating-stem-cell-niche-promote-regeneration

• For support or more information about head and neck cancer, or to make a donation, you can visit the Throat Cancer Foundation website at https://www.throatcancerfoundation.org

• To get hands on and creative with the tools of science, you can drop into an open session at the ASCUS Lab at Summerhall in Edinburgh, Scotland’s publically accessible laboratory. You can find out about their many courses and opportunities here http://www.ascus.org.uk

• For insight into human pathology and physiology, you can visit Surgeons’ Hall Museums  https://museum.rcsed.ac.uk