AN ancient child mummy owned by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has been carefully transported to London for a new art exhibition.

The 3ft mummy of an infant boy has been housed by the museum in Beaumont Street since it was excavated in Egypt by a British archaeologist in 1888.

But now, after a trip down the M40 in a specially-built case, the mummy is at the centre of artist Angela Palmer's exhibition Unravelled, which runs until June 12.

Unravelled includes more than 20 works by the mother-of-three, who trained at the Ruskin College of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford.

Mrs Palmer drew slices of the head and body on multiple sheets of glass and presented them on a vertical plane, so she could create a three-dimensional work showing the architecture of the human form.

Mrs Palmer, a former journalist, went to great lengths to ensure her research was accurate and even took the mummy to the John Radcliffe Hospital, where a scan discovered it was a boy.

She said: "Over the past two years, I have watched the child's body slowly and intriguingly turn into a three-dimensional shape in my studio, using details from the 2,500 scans from the John Radcliffe.

"I began to feel an eerie closeness to the child and felt compelled to visit the tomb where he lay for nearly 2,000 years before being taken to Oxford.

"My work is a marriage of science and art and it has been a fascinating project.

"There is still some controversy about the child's age, but we think he died aged 18 months and was suffering from pneumonia."

Using a copy of an old map drawn by archaeologist Flinders Petrie, who excavated the mummy 40 miles south-west of Cairo in 1888, Angela visited the burial site near Hawara village.

There she filled her water bottle with sand, which she brought back to Britain to form part of the exhibition.

She also filmed and photographed the children who now live in the village - the modern descendants of the community the boy knew during his short life.

The scans have also been used to produce plaster replicas of the boy's skull and toes.

Cavendish Imaging, a medical imaging and modelling company, applied techniques normally used in surgical planning, to recreate this dead child from another age.

Cavendish's images are being displayed at the Waterhouse & Dodd gallery in Cork Street, London, but are not for sale, and will be given to the Ashmolean Museum after the exhibition ends.

The mummy will be returned to the Ashmolean at the end of the exhibition.

Mrs Palmer's project developed four years ago after she telephoned Dr Helen Whitehouse, egyptologist at the Ashmolean, who suggested the child mummy could be scanned at the hospital.

The mummy has been on display at the museum in the past, but recently has been in storage due to the ongoing £50m renovation project.