Memento Mori

Memento Mori
2019

Media: photographic print on di-bond aluminium under acrylic glass (edition of 5)

Size: 1577 x 502 mm

Exhibited:

2019 – Within and Between: Women, Bodies, Generations (group exhibition), The Glass Tank, Oxford.

About this work:

This work was made for the group exhibition Within and Between: Women/Bodies/Generations, in which three artists (myself, Janice Howard and Lisa Richardson) considered women’s lives mediated through life altering events, expanding— through creative practice in diverse forms—discourses of ‘intergenerationality’ and ‘autoethnography’.

In the five works I developed for this exhibition, methods of taxonomy and analysis were used to recover the physicality of human bodies as they emerge, grow, mature and die. This work was informed by material residues left behind by such rites of passage. I collaborated with the Parkinson’s Brain Bank at Imperial College London, documenting physical processes involved in the preparation of tissue samples and worked with microscopic images of diseased neurons. Through this work, I reconsidered, imaginatively, relationships between physical and cognitive changes in individuals suffering from diseases such as Parkinson’s. I also collaborated with an orthodontist and used photogrammetry to make 3D printed reproductions of shed infant milk teeth utilising imaging techniques developed for medical/scientific research as a creative research tool. Both (neurological and dental) tissues being ‘imaged’ in this work were characterised by the severing of close personal connections: teeth shed by my child, having left infancy behind and brain cells donated to science by my deceased mother. The resulting works ‘re-image’ what physically remains of lost individuals (both living and deceased) by engaging with irretrievable pasts and unknowable futures.

In this large photographic work an image of a slide of my mother’s cerebellum is juxtaposed with an image of her wedding bouquet. The proportions of the piece correspond exactly to her bodily measurements.

 This work develops strategies used in an earlier body of work Three Stages of Labour, 2007, which referenced both ‘imaging’ and ‘materiality’ in/of assisted conception and the traumatised maternal body.

 Within and Between was supported by: Oxford Brookes University, Arts University Bournemouth, Imperial College London, Parkinson’s UK.