Born in Aberdeen in 1957, Palmer had a distinguished career in journalism before studying at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University and the Royal College of Art in London from 2002-7.

Palmer developed her sculptural technique while studying anatomy at the Ruskin School and has subsequently worked on many projects with scientists at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, Aberdeen University and University College London. Palmer’s technique, in which digital information provided by medical scanners is used to inspire a three-dimensional image, engraved or drawn on glass, reveals the inner architecture contained within an object.

She has works in the collections of National Galleries of Scotland, the Ashmolean Museum, and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, Washington. Her Ghost Forest is a major touring installation of tree roots from commercially logged forest in Western Africa intended to highlight the threat to global climate from deforestation.