This Glass Sculpture of the AstraZeneca Coronavirus Vaccine Is 1 Million Times Larger Than the Real Thing

Speaking to the BBC’s Front Row, Jerram said he was motivated to make the sculpture after getting covid-19 in November. The artist revealed that he still does not have a proper sense of smell because of the disease and that his ears ring with tinnitus.

“During my recovery, it became clear to me that my next artwork should focus on the vaccine, our way out of this global crisis, as a tribute to the scientists and medical teams who have been working collaboratively across the world to fight the virus,” Jerram said in a statement.

Making the sculpture was not a walk in the park, Jerram told Front Row. He collaborated with virologists and a team of glassblowers with experience in scientific glassware. The sculpture is made from borosilicate glass and is produced with the same materials and techniques used in medical scientific glassware, such as test tubes, and in distilleries.

This isn’t the first time Jerram has made glass artwork related to the pandemic. In March of last year, he made a sculpture of the novel coronavirus, which causes covid-19. Both sculptures are a part of the series Glass Microbiology, which he’s been working on since 2004. The series aims to contemplate the global impact of each disease it represents.

“By extracting the colour from the imagery and creating jewel-like beautiful sculptures in glass, a complex tension has arisen between the artworks’ beauty and what they represent,” Jerram’s website states.

As for why his sculptures are made using colorless glass, Jerram points out that since viruses are smaller than a wavelength of light, they don’t really have color. That knowledge inspired him to make transparent and colorless medical sculptures.

The artist said that photographs of his glass sculptures are even used by the scientific community in medical books and journals.

Jerram said that he will make five sculptures of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. All proceeds of the sale of these new pieces will go to Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, to help the organization with its covid-19 response efforts.

At the end of the day, Jerram is really pleased with his glass Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine sculpture. It’s almost like a three-dimensional snowflake, he said, calling it absolutely beautiful. But the sculpture also serves another purpose.

“[I]t’s also about promoting the idea of getting vaccinated,” Jerram said.