Flesh of our Flesh, Bone of our Bone
Two week artist residency at Cuckoo Farm Studios, Colchester, Essex
6th to 21st August 2011
The grant of a two week residency at Cuckoo Farm Art Studios has paved a way into the field of the mortal being; a path in between the territory of birth and death I am creatively accustomed to.
Human mutations, anomalies, malformations, deformities, curiosities, congenital diseases, “monsters” and “freaks of nature” have been collected, catalogued and pedigreed in the literature of Medicine since the middle ages. Curious audiences gazed at their deformities during the early circus sideshows: the barons and princes of Renaissance Europe exchanged gold for “freaks” of their own: scientists and scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries performed the study of teratology– literally, the ‘science of monsters’.
As early as the 1620’s, the English scientist Francis Bacon believed that the monstrous, the strange, the deviant, or merely the different, revealed the laws of nature, “And once we know those laws, we can reconstruct the world as we wish.” The presence of such medical testimonies marked a new point in time; the causes of deformity must be sought in nature.
The human oddity is natural, albeit that nature has played a bitter prank on them. And technically, we are all mutants, as each new embroyo possess about a hundred mutations; three of which will be harmful. Mutations alter the meaning of our genes, with some even destroying meaning. We all sprout from such fragile soil, but yet, it is upon this mutual ground that we observe and judge human oddities for reasons that we seldom perceive.
By means of art, I have ventured into the obscure world of “monsters” with the desire to resurrect their rare, bizarre appearances’ from the dust drenched archives of cabinet cards. Using my extensive repository of visuals and literature on the ages of human oddities, I’ve breathed beauty back into these extraordinary beings, and rendered a stage for their personal accounts, stories and diagnosis’.
In celebration of their mortal uniqueness; of our uniqueness.
http://www.cuckoofarmstudios.org.uk/
6th to 21st August 2011
The grant of a two week residency at Cuckoo Farm Art Studios has paved a way into the field of the mortal being; a path in between the territory of birth and death I am creatively accustomed to.
Human mutations, anomalies, malformations, deformities, curiosities, congenital diseases, “monsters” and “freaks of nature” have been collected, catalogued and pedigreed in the literature of Medicine since the middle ages. Curious audiences gazed at their deformities during the early circus sideshows: the barons and princes of Renaissance Europe exchanged gold for “freaks” of their own: scientists and scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries performed the study of teratology– literally, the ‘science of monsters’.
As early as the 1620’s, the English scientist Francis Bacon believed that the monstrous, the strange, the deviant, or merely the different, revealed the laws of nature, “And once we know those laws, we can reconstruct the world as we wish.” The presence of such medical testimonies marked a new point in time; the causes of deformity must be sought in nature.
The human oddity is natural, albeit that nature has played a bitter prank on them. And technically, we are all mutants, as each new embroyo possess about a hundred mutations; three of which will be harmful. Mutations alter the meaning of our genes, with some even destroying meaning. We all sprout from such fragile soil, but yet, it is upon this mutual ground that we observe and judge human oddities for reasons that we seldom perceive.
By means of art, I have ventured into the obscure world of “monsters” with the desire to resurrect their rare, bizarre appearances’ from the dust drenched archives of cabinet cards. Using my extensive repository of visuals and literature on the ages of human oddities, I’ve breathed beauty back into these extraordinary beings, and rendered a stage for their personal accounts, stories and diagnosis’.
In celebration of their mortal uniqueness; of our uniqueness.
http://www.cuckoofarmstudios.org.uk/