Bacteria from 300-year-old Ovid poetry volume inspires 'bio-artist'

Sarah Craske found the copy of Metamorphoses in a secondhand bookshop and used bacteria within its pages to create art with her own blood

There was more than poetry trapped between the leather covers of a 300-year-old volume of Ovid's Metamorphoses: blood, sweat and snot feature in an art installation that displays the bacteria within its pages.

The sweat and the droplets from an ancient sneeze that spattered one page were contributed by centuries of previous owners and readers of the book - but the blood was the artist's own, donated by Sarah Craske as part of the medium for cultivating the organisms.