Showing six glass installation panels at the Arnolfini in 2018 marked a genuine evolution in how Helen Wilson Roe told Henrietta Lacks's story. The work grew out of two formative encounters: meeting the Lacks family in person, and collaborating with Bristol cell biologists Professor Craig McArdle, Professor Harry Mellor and Dr Jon Lane. That combination gave the panels an authority few artworks on this subject could claim, grounded equally in lived family memory and in the science that made Henrietta Lacks's cells so significant.
Choosing glass as the medium was itself a considered act of translation. Rendering cell science in light and glass let the work occupy a space between art and laboratory, echoing the very story it told: one that has always sat at the meeting point of biology and biography, of what was studied and who was studied. Exhibiting that work at the Arnolfini, one of Bristol's leading contemporary art venues, gave it a platform equal to its ambition, allowing viewers to encounter the science and the person together rather than as separate narratives.