- Title
- Our State
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-
- Date
- September 2010
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- Place
- ["North Carolina, United States"]
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Our State
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Carolina arts
The Hidden Garden
Throughout her career as a radiologic technologist, Frances Apple relied on the high-tech tools
of her trade to reveal her patients’ conditions. Today, she uses those same X-rays to peer at the
beauty within some unexpected subjects
By Josh Shaffer
PHOTOGRAPHY BY L1SSA GOTWALS
You rarely look at an X-ray,
mysterious and gray, and
think, “Lovely. Thai's
something I'd like to frame."
Mostly, the X-ray brings had
news printed in black and white.
Broken arms. Fractured skulls. Spots
on the lung. Even the name sounds
ominous: X-ray, like something a
super villain would build inside a
secret island volcano.
So Frances Apple's artwork — her
stark portraits of wisteria, gladiola,
and hibiscus — strike a viewer even
harder for having formed inside
an X-ray machine.
By exposing flowers, spices, and
even sliced peppers to soft radiation,
she peels back the outer skin and
shows a hidden world in shades of
black and gray, looking at the inside
of a tulip, you see the flower laid
delightfully bare, as if you’d traveled
up its stem in a bead of water.
In Apple's hands, the X-ray
becomes a brush, or a chisel.
And in her care, its beams aren’t
hunting for tumors or cracks.
TTtey'rc unraveling layers, tunneling
deeper, opening folds like Georgia
O'Keeffe peering into the chambers
of a rose.
“You can actually see inside the
flower," says Apple, who is
КО.
“You
can actually see the little stamens."
Apple took up the craft two years ago follow ing
a long career as a radiologic technologist — or “rad
Frances Apple acinired the artistry o> her mentor. Jane Co*, for decades before
putting her own shills into the practice of capturing X-ray images of (towers.
tcch" — most of it at Duke Hospital in Durham.
The work also pays tribute to her mentor in the
field, Jane Cox, who started X-raying flowers in
174 Our State September 2010
