Kaleidoscopic MRI Art Brings Beauty to Neurological Illness

Artist Elizabeth Jameson redefines her multiple sclerosis with vibrant prints of her brain.

June 27, 2016, 11:55am

Kaleidoscope, Part I. Jameson digitally manipulated MRIs of her own brain to create a collage. All images courtesy of the artist.

Elizabeth Jameson wants you to look at her brain. Actually, she wants you to stare at it. Over the last 20 years, she’s chronicled her multiple sclerosis by making vibrant prints of her magnetic resonance imaging scans (MRIs) as she’s begun to lose function of her hands, feet, and voice. Jameson, 65, illuminates the beauty and imperfection of the brain—the amorphous folds of tender tissue, the backbone reminiscent of pine needles shooting out from a rigid spine, and delicate strings of looping blood vessels dancing like sperm cells—in bright reds, yellows, and aquamarines.

The artist burns her MRIs onto copper aluminum plates using heat from the sun, a process called solar etching. She then prints her brain scans on paper and enhances them using acrylic paint, colored pencil, and chalk pastel. This has captured the attention of neuroscience departments at Harvard University, University of California San Francisco, and King’s College in London, among others around the world, that have featured her art.

Blush I, solarplate etching on paper. A birds’s-eye view of Jameson’s brain known as an axial MRI.

Jameson recently unveiled a 16x4 foot MRI of prominent neurologist Daniel Pelletier’s brain at UC Berkeley’s Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Services. The scan was done using a 7T, one of the most powerful MRI imaging techniques, allowing Jameson’s work to reveal details of the brain that have been seen by few people. Usually, however, Jameson is her own subject. She tells The Creators Project that she wants to, “help scientists understand that they’re dealing with human beings” and, “help people be seduced into looking at disease” rather than be frightened by it.

Her beautification of illness is, in part, inspired by her own experiences with people not asking questions about how she is or acknowledging her presence now that she’s a quadriplegic. Jameson believes most people don’t ask the disabled questions about their conditions, because they feel it’s taboo or they don’t know how to broach the subject. “I would say that the majority of [disabled] people really would love to talk about it but they’re used to being closeted,” Jameson explains. She hopes her work, which she refers to as “public interest art,” will help fuel open conversations about the experience of disease.

The artist dismisses what she calls her idealistic desire to “change the world,” but her life has been undeniably shaped by altruism. Before her diagnosis, she was a civil rights lawyer working in the prison system, fighting for gender equality, and even working with Hillary Clinton at the White House on health policy. Her career as a lawyer came to an abrupt end when, one day, while she was at the park with her children, her ability to speak vanished as a result of brain damage. It took more than a year for her to be able to talk again. She now makes her art with the help of an assistant, but says she feels lucky relative to people with worse diseases or less support from family.

It helps that she has no shortage of muses. Recently, Jameson began working with Diffusion Tensor Imaging, a sophisticated variation on the conventional MRI. The scans reveal the complex network of nerve fibers connecting the different brain areas. This technology may allow neuroscientists to understand the way neurological scars left by multiple sclerosis are linked to patients’ disabilities. Meanwhile, Jameson is using these new scans to dive deeper into her own brain.

Her next body of work features 3D pieces in wire, fabric, and thread. “I’m so glad to be alive,” she says. “I just feel like every year I have, I’m blessed.”