Angela Palmer

Palmer's work Beneath the Surface: Self Portrait based on MRI was selected for the 2019 Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Award exhibition. Another of Palmer's self portraits was selected for the 2019 Scottish Portrait Awards touring exhibition.

Palmer has developed a technique in which she uses MRI and CT scans to 'map' objects by drawing or engraving details onto multiple sheets of glass to create a layered 3D image which appears to float in a glass cube. For Brain of the Artist, 2012, (collection Scottish National Portrait Gallery), Palmer created a self-portrait using MRI scans of her brain, carried out at University College London. "The result is a most unusual and highly objective form of portraiture with a powerful, poignant beauty ... which develops in a challenging way the concept of self-representation." Using CT scans, Palmer also recreated an Egyptian child mummy in glass, which is on permanent display in the Ashmolean Museum. The sculpture is exhibited next to the actual mummy, allowing viewers to see details of the child as a three-dimensional drawing without disturbing its bandages. Using this method, Palmer has also created portraits of Carol Vorderman, the novelist Robert Harris (who based a character's oeuvre on Palmer's art in his book The Fear Index); the head of Eclipse, the world's most famous racehorse, and an endangered green turtle from Bermuda.

Her latest artwork is Susie Wolff: Portrait of a Racing Driver, this is Palmer's second work in the permanent collection of The Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Her largest scale installation was The Ghost Forest, which was shown in Trafalgar Square in 2009. Sir John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland, chose Palmer's Brain of the Artist to feature in his book 100 Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland. The sculpture toured in a tri-national exhibition entitled From Rembrandt to the Selfie at the Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe; the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Lyon; and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

The Ghost Forest was a large-scale installation by Palmer in which she brought ten primary rainforest tree stumps from a commercially logged forest in Ghana to Trafalgar Square in November 2009. Palmer wanted to highlight the shocking rate of deforestation. She said "Today, a tropical forest the size of a football pitch is destroyed every four seconds, affecting climate, biodiversity and the livelihoods of indigenous people. The trees in the Ghost Forest – most of which fell naturally in storms – are intended to represent rainforest trees worldwide; the absence of their trunks is presented as a metaphor for the removal of the world's lungs caused through the loss of our forests."