Luminescent Forms
Roland Verreet’s Luminescent Forms series consists of photographs of foraminifera: tiny single-celled organisms found in marine habitats around the world that, when fossilised become part of our sand structure. Using a high-powered microscope, engineer Roland Verreet meticulously magnifies these creatures hundreds of times over so that we can view their remarkable structures in large format — creating images of startling beauty in the process. This series formed part of the exhibition Luminescent Forms at NGCI in 2015 along with glass sculptures by Caymanian artist Davin Ebanks, developed in response to Vereet’s images.
About the Artist
Roland Verreet
Roland Verreet lives in Germany and is a renowned mechanical engineer. As a creative outlet he studies foraminifera, following in a tradition established by nineteenth-century naturalists: gathering samples of this ancient life form and capturing their intricate structures under complex optical, digital, and scanning electron microscopes. Experimenting one day, Verreet used these instruments to look at samples of sand from the Cayman Islands, finding that most of the supposed grains of sand were actually of organic origin. Fascinated by these tiny single-celled animals, he started the painstaking process of cleaning, analysing, and photographing them. The resulting series of photographs are now part of the National Gallery’s permanent collection and were featured in the solo exhibition Luminescent Forms at NGCI in 2015, subsequently travelling to the Little Cayman Museum in 2019 and to Cayman Brac in 2020.
