This visual presentation will use three examples resulting from a period as an artist-researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). Combining knowledge gained in LSHTM’s library and archive with literary research and information gleaned from experts, within the artworks and the presentation a poetic space for understanding is uncovered and, crucially, the viewers’ individual subjective body is highlighted as the axial point of experience.
Within the expanded field of contemporary art practice site-specificity and context are key elements in determining the form of presented artworks. The processes involved in researching context – both textual and conversational - have become a vital and dynamic part of art-making; impacting positively on content, and revealing possible new methods and directions for works. This visual presentation will use three examples resulting from a period as an artist researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM):
bad air [mal’aria] (2001) a permanent commission that used texts, hand-rendered in gold leaf, ranging from the Classical period to the twentieth century to explain shifting understandings of the causes of, symptoms, and cures for a tertian fever, specifi cally malarial. … the fevers of Great Britain … (2002) a sculptural work using research carried out in 1862 by Charles Murchison. The text referenced is a reworking of the author’s recordings of his own typhus delirium. Gold Field (2004), a series of three installed works, comprising photographs, video and 3 gilded books,that directly reference Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and Merck’s Materia Medica (1899) which prescribes Gold itself as a cure for melancholy, the cause of which was both mental and physical, according to Burton.
Combining knowledge gained in LSHTM’s library and archive with literary research and information gleaned from experts, within the artworks and the presentation a poetic space for understanding is uncovered and, crucially, the viewers’ individual subjective body is highlighted as the axial point of experience.