The reasons that experts agree to give up their time to speak to me, or help me do things,
or collaborate with me; usually it comes down to the fact that some of my unanswered questions
are actually shared by them, and some of the questions that come up must go unanswered.
I suppose just being a bit of a wild child of the 70s, kicking around the countryside
as your playground really, that an interest in botany of course I wouldn’t have called
it such a thing there, but a general interest in natural sciences, life and death, the way
things interact with each other and interconnect, was very much a part of my childhood wondering.
When I was at art school I was really intrigued by life drawing – representing the figure.
I was really bad at it, but I knew that that interest in the body was very much there.
Art and anatomy from the earliest days had a real interconnected relationship in terms
of representing the body.
So when I went for the first time to the Anatomy Museum and I saw the specimens in jars; the
intricacy and beauty of both the human specimens preserved, dissections preserved, just the
beauty of that, it was kind of like, ‘that’s it’. That’s the jigsaw puzzle piece that
was missing. This is how I can think about my interest in relation to the body and the
presentation of the body.
The very first questions that I was asking were usually about borrowing things, so I
was going to ask to borrow specimens. I think I got lucky; I met someone who was an incredibly
engaging and interesting person, a kind of old school anatomy, general interested in
liberal arts. I was given a catalogue of the bone suppliers who supplied the specimens
to the students in anatomy. And that sort of blew my mind – that you could buy human
bones – just ring up and order a spine, or a complete skeleton, or whatever.
That’s an important example of the kind of dialogue, usually it’s something quite
simple I’m asking, but it opens a door into a whole sort of world of knowledge.
Quite often I will have a strong association with a material that is immediately suggesting
its use. So the use of plastercasting is a good example. Of course it’s got an artistic
association with historical casting, but also life and death masks being taken in plaster
I suppose going back to my interest in medical museums, and the way that it’s used there.
The materials themselves are – I’m very careful to think about what story they’re
telling, but then of course there’s the very day-to-day artist’s work of ‘what
do the materials do once you start manipulating them?
I do spend a lot of time just sitting with a sketchbook, and trying to think through
things. But then it’s really important to spend a similar amount of time with materials,
because sometimes these thoughts that just couldn’t develop, suddenly they manifest
themselves.
First of all it’s the aesthetics, but then it’s the ethics as well.
The question of, well yes, that’s an
incredibly preserved gallbladder, injected with mercury to show
the tissue network, but whose was it, and how was it obtained? And that’s something
that I’ve been able to keep – that’s stayed with me throughout my whole career;
is trying to ask that question to medical professionals and museum people, and also
trying to work my way through it in the work, to try to figure it out for myself, and hopefully
for audiences too.
One incredible object, a foetal skeleton that had been bound in leather, and there was also
a female pelvis with it, and it was a demonstration model for childbirth. What I was interested
in when I saw the objects there was this – the two sides of the coin between yes, it’s
a teaching aid; it’s a demonstration; it’s got this sort of medical purpose that’s
to do with education, yet the object itself is so full of pathos, and there will be a
tragic story inherent in it.
Is that a dignified way to be handling that? What about the history of that? What about
the woman whose pelvis is also being used as a demonstration model?
Sometimes it’s about trying to find answers, but often it’s about layering more and more
questions on top of things that there is no definitive answer to - it’s just, the big
picture is life and death, so these things are incredibly complex, and quite often the
works do often represent that too.
Most of the time the journey is more important than any answer at the end. It can be that
these questions remain unanswered.