It is World Embroidery Day, but, if you want to join the celebrations and you’re not a fan of traditional embroidered motifs, you can go down the science path. Yesterday we looked at an artwork inspired by neuroscience and there have actually been intriguing projects revolving around neuroscience and embroidery.
In 2020 Professor Cathy Abbott (from the Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine at the University of Edinburgh) came up with an idea - The Cajal Embroidery Project - to celebrate Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) and the centenary of the 1920 Royal Decree that established the illustrious Instituto Cajal in Madrid, Spain.
As you may remember from a previous post, the Spanish scientist identified the role of neurons in the nervous system as proved by his early 1900s studies showing human neonatal astrocytes, motor sensitive patterns, afferents to the cortex and ganglia of the sympathetic nervous system. Cajal produced amazingly detailed drawings showing illustrations of neurons and their arborisations.
For his works, Cajal received a Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 1906, while his Institute put Spain at the forefront of neuroscience research, with several scientific giants graduating from it, such as Pío del Río Hortega (1882–1945), who discovered oligodendrocytes and microglia.
For the Cajal Embroidery Project, over 75 volunteers collaborated across six countries to create 81 intricate, hand-stitched panels of Cajal's images that, stitched together, ended up creating a single tapestry that was displayed at the Royall Hospital for Children and Young People in Edinburgh.
The embroiderers involved used ivory fabric (or cream cotton/linen) and black or dark brown yarns (some of them even made their own nettle yarn and used natural dyes, such as walnut husks to give the yarn a dark colour) to be more coherent with the original drawings.
Some volunteers chose to emulate even the circular blue-ink stamp with the words "Museo Cajal, Madrid" and a number handwritten by Pedro Manzano, the caretaker who first catalogued Cajal's drawings.
There is a thread (pun intended...) that ties the embroiderers involved in this neuroscience project to Cajal's work and some amazing correspondences between the illustrations and the embroideries. Cajal made his drawings and studies in solitude, in a laboratory fashioned in the attic of his own house; contributors to this project, many of them new to neuroscience or embroidery, worked during the lockdown imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and, when they didn't have access to supplies because of the restrictions, they became creative and adventurous, and came up with new techniques, dyeing fabrics with teabags to achieve the sepia-coloured background.
This process reminds of Cajal's studies refining fellow Nobel Laureate Camillo Golgi’s "reazione nera" staining technique by applying silver nitrate to specimens via two brief pulses, rather than soaking them for two days. Besides, Cajal made illustrations of neurons and their arborisations demonstrating that the notion that brain cells are distinct, diverse units, which communicate with one another.
This calls to mind the modus operandi of the volunteer embroiderers who worked by themselves, but were in reality interconnected as they produced single pieces that then became a single large tapestry.The results of the project are suspended between art and science and they proved successful as they were used also for the cover of The Lancet Neurology magazine.
The December 2021 issue of the scientific magazine featured all the embroideries created for the Cajal Embroidery Project as they appeared in the assembled tapestry. Actually, last year several covers of The Lancet Neurology featured a neuroscience embroidery, some inspired by Cajal's drawings, others by other studies - from Cajal's illustration of a glial cell and of the hippocampus, to neuronal-glial-vascular interaction, pyramidal and cortical neurons, developing and developed cerebellar Purkinje cells and the many layers of the retina. All of them were made by scientists and researchers and introduced a special feature in the magazine.
The Cajal Embroidery Project is over, but there is still a Facebook Group of scientists, embroiderers, craftspeople and beginners, that you may want to join to come up with your own interpretation of Cajal's illustrations.
English neurophysiologist Charles Scott Sherrington stated in 1935 that Cajal and his pupils, "opened a fresh era of knowledge". Proving that his drawings are still relevant today, this project bridging science with embroidery opens instead a fresh era for more collaborative cross-disciplinary projects.
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