Jalila Essaïdi

The Fox News article “Bulletproof Human Skin” Made From Spider Silk reported

Take a pinch of Spider-Man’s webbing, add some human skin cells, and you just may end up with skin worthy of Superman.
 
A Dutch team created a piece of “bulletproof” skin from special, U.S.-made spider silk and human skin cells and found that it indeed can repel bullets — as long as they’re not traveling too fast.
 
The bulletproof skin showed its superiority over normal human skin by stopping a bullet fired at a reduced speed. But it fell short of surviving a shot at normal speed from a .22 caliber rifle, the benchmark for protection for a Type 1 bulletproof vest.
 
The result did not discourage Jalila Essaïdi, the Dutch artist who, along with the Forensic Genomics Consortium Netherlands, created the skin. She just wanted an art project demonstrating the relative concept of safety.

Born in 1980, Jalila Essaïdi is a BioArtist living and working in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
 
Jalila was previously Art Teacher at Fontys Art Academy, Tilburg; Event Manager at Fontys Art Academy, Tilburg; and Owner at Essaïdi Cosmedix, Eindhoven.
 
Her artwork is about the recognition of the transience of matter and a human desire to keep and hold. In her work, she embeds this desperate race against time by using living or organic matter, capable of decay or the product of decay.
 
While Jalila uses a variety of materials and processes in each project, their roots are consistent. They are linked by nature’s genius, the fruits from three billion years of trial and error resulting in various ways of fighting transience, preserving information, recreating.
 
By embracing new materials and/or knowledge resulting from biotechnology, she offers a view on the social, political, ethical, and cultural issues resulting from this relatively new ability of humans to understand and manipulate the mechanism behind nature’s genius.
 
Jalila earned her Bachelor’s in Art at Fontys Hogescholen in 2009, graduated in Three-dimensional artwork, autonomous; Educational research and development; Art review, Art and cultural history. She studied Bioart (Honors) at Universiteit Leiden from 2008 to 2010, and is currently completing her Master’s in Art at Alliantie Kunsten Fontys Zuyd.
 
In 2011 she was a recipient of the Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Award.
 
Recent exhibitions include Designers & Artists 4 Genomics at Naturalis, Leiden; 2.6g 329m/s at Verbeke Foundation, Kemzeke; Untouchables at Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven; Next Ecology at Amber Platform, Istanbul.
 
Read Artist uses spider-goat silk to make “bulletproof skin”. Read her blog. Visit her Facebook page. Read her Google+ profile and her LinkedIn profile.