My exploration began with my grandfather’s stethoscope, or rather the hours spent listening to my heartbeat after his death. My work seeks to engage that of the body and re-membered organs. It evokes the viewer’s own body and the display shows both what is revealed as well as hidden.

 

The work "dissects".

 

I seek to put my finger on the pulse of what it means to RE-member, and I see the cabinet and the gallery as a body and the organs placed within as remnants of an imagined body. I also examine and question the concept of systems - those of identification, display, categorization and classification are ones I use to reconfigure actual and sculpted body parts, instruments and video/sound.

 

My techniques of corrosion casting create materials which speak to the fragility of life, questioning how they exist as a remnant and previously functioning organ. In the videos, as an unqualified surgeon, my dissections explore the inner body, speaking to the re-stitching of oneself through imagined and inaccurate procedures, as well as allowing for a vicarious exploration of the dismembered body. In this sense I evoke a reconfiguration of what it means to touch another body; to take, shape and stitch, or cast a body.

A confrontation with the anatomical inner workings of visceral substances also reflects the concept of the Abject[1], and I hope to both lure and repulse the viewer with a sense of fascination for mysteries of the body.

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[1] According to Julia Kristeva, the abject refers to the human reaction (of horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. It is a concept that is often used to describe bodies and things that one finds repulsive or disgusting, and in order to preserve one's identity they are cast out.