Michael Geddis

Contest entry

Title: Shut Pandora’s Box

The glass Petri dish that contains my bronze cast is normally used for growing bacteria.  The cast, filling the bottom of the dish, is incised with ambiguous forms.  

A crude network pattern dominates the middle of the cast’s face.  At the outer edges, it is connected to strands like zig-zag traces of random walking.  

Many pairs of small rounded cell-like bodies connect to the network and some similar, but single, individuals lie in clumps beyond this structure.   Their morphology resembles the ubiquitous bacterium Streptococcus.  It can communicate on a cell-to-cell basis through the phenomenon of quorum sensing.  Secretory chemicals (autoinducers) prompt a colony of individual Streptococci to act like an interconnected network and simultaneously form biofilms or become virulent.

Stochastic mathematical modelling, including fractional reaction-diffusion models, has undoubtedly improved our understanding of quorum sensing.  This insight might unlock future therapeutic interventions through modification of quorum sensing.  Maybe the lid on Pandora’s boxful of antibiotic-resistant bacteria will become firmly shut in the future?   However, some reviewers have noted that this area of research tends not to be published in mathematical journals.  Maybe it has not been fully embraced by the mathematical establishment as a fruitful area for study? 

Artist biography

Michael Geddis is based in Northern Ireland and makes finely detailed drawings and sculptures. His work hovers in the no man's land between abstraction and figuration and is inspired by natural shapes and patterns. Geddis is particularly interested in complex microscopic forms. His work has been exhibited in Ireland, GB, Scandinavia and USA and is included in several public art collections including the National Gallery of Ireland. Geddis has received regular awards in Ireland and was short-listed for the 7th John Ruskin Prize in London earlier this year. He is a Churchill Fellow and Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellow.