Background to the project:

"I arrived at the RCA as a ceramicist. I had spent the previous 2 years turning solid lumps of clay into white liquid ‘slip’. I didn’t realise at the time it was the solidity of the clay I didn't like. I painted the white slip in thin layers onto cardboard boxes and fired them, almost expecting them not to survive. Sometimes they did, but not for long. If a photograph was clay, they would be clay photographs. The RCA had a hot glass furnace and I rejected the clay altogether. It wasn’t the finished glass objects that drew me in, but the overlooked journey to get to the object; the heat, the colour, the fluidity and the performance and decisions of the makers.

What interested me most about my Antarctic residency was the space between the environment and the people living in it. It was difficult to exist on a mental and physical level, and I made work that reflected that. Antarctica intensified my awareness of mark making, and made me reject the notion of 'making objects' even more than before. When I returned home I created a project that was based on film and photography, but I needed to use a light that was less ‘solid’, I wanted the very source of my images to be more precarious, less controllable.

Working with microbiologist Simon Park and Caterina Albano, I used bacterial bioluminescence, a living organism, to create a series of photographs, film and installations. The bacteria died over the course of my portraits, it became even harder to capture the photographs of naked skin, and that is how I wanted it to be. They nearly don’t exist."

This project is called 'Exploring the Invisible' it has been made possible by the support of the Wellcome Trust and is one of the projects included in ‘Bio Design – Nature, Science, Creativity’, Edited and text by William Myers. foreword by Paola Antonelli, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Published by Thames and Hudson.

Box 7, Old Operating Theatre, London

April 10, 2009

'Box7' collection contents. Misfits and unsuitable handling items from the Old Operating Theatre, London Bridge.

Old Operating Theatre ‘Box 7’

Joseph Lister

April 10, 2009

Before 1867 every other patient carried into a hospital for surgical treatment, was carried out dead of blood poisoning, their wounds a stinking fester.

Joseph Lister, a young surgeon in Glasgow, smelled at the festers. They reminded him of sewage; and sewage reminded him of how the city of Carlisle was deodorizing its wastes—by carbolic acid. He slopped carbolic acid on the open wounds of accident cases brought to him. The acid worked; it prevented development of “hospital gangrene.” he had realised that microbes in the air were causing the putrefaction and had to be destroyed before they entered the wound.

From Pasteur and Lister’s 19th century connections of the implications of bacteria in human health, scientists most up to date techniques for fighting human disease continues to be based on the cellular activity of micro organisms.

Georges Bataille

March 16, 2009

'We are not essential to the world which has an existance that is independant of us.It would exist had we not been born and continue to exist after we have died. And yet this world, as we perceive it, is only concievable in terms of our own existance. For us it exists only through our perception of it. Though we may sense it as alien to us, still it is only through our own sensibility which begins with our bodily experience that it is made real. Separate though we may be from the world, we remain essentially matter, that is we are made as the same stuff as the world'

Georges Bataille (1897-1962)

Bleeding bowl

March 11, 2009

Bleeding bowl. Downloaded from ebay March 2009.

Simon’s mug University of Surrey. Last used Feb 07.

'Exploring The Invisible' Blog 2009 - 2011

Background to the project:

Project Blog below: