From her Melbourne based studio, Beth takes inspiration from her professional illustration and animation practice and creates artwork that is exhibited nationally and internationally.
Beth Croce is a certified medical artist with a background in fine arts and a Masters degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (USA). From her Melbourne based studio, Beth takes inspiration from her professional illustration and animation practice and creates artwork that is exhibited nationally and internationally.
The premise of the Window to the Internal World CT Scan Art Project is to create beautiful and intriguing artworks from computed tomography (CT) scans of animals. This will be done in collaboration with the renowned Leibniz Institute for Zoo & Wildlife Research (Berlin, Germany). Images captured by the Institute’s Toshiba CT scanner are normally utilized as a cutting-edge clinical diagnostic tool, enabling visualization of the interior anatomy, such as the skeleton. Beth will reconstruct CT datasets gathered by the IZB using OsiriX software and manipulate the resulting images further using Photoshop. and In this project’s usage, the software is essentially an artist’s tool capable of rendering the digital information in an infinite number of ways in two and three dimensions.
In the first stage of the project, Beth will be creating aesthetic versions of the animal scans to be placed in children’s hospital settings. The CT datasets are a true window into the living interiors of people and animals alike. Beth will be using her experience as an artist specializing in medical imagery to highlight the detail, symmetry and inherent beauty of these diverse animals’ anatomies. The resulting artworks will serve to reduce anxiety in children undergoing the same imaging procedures as the animals, providing a friendly interface with intimidating high-end hospital technology.
In the second stage of this project Beth will use these artistic digital renderings as the inspiration for further works using hand engraving and other traditional lithographic and etching processes. In portraying this cutting-edge 21st century science in classical 15th century artistic media, these second stage artworks are inherently contrasted with early anatomical art and update this traditional genre. These artworks are intended for general audiences and will be exhibited in venues in Australia and Germany.