Picturing Fatemaps

I use the means and methods of visual art to produce medical research. The resulting hybrid research images are alive in the cultures of both art and science.

My foundational practice is drawing. However, drawing-as-process has taken me into diverse technologies for the realization of my ideas, and has extended into sculptural modeling, computer animation, video installation, and performance art. Drawing, as a technology-of-the-hand, for me, has become a somatechnics (bodily being as always already technologised, and a technology always already enfleshed).

Picturing Fatemaps is comprised of three distinct elements:

First, my computer animation, Genital Embryogenesis plays continuously on a video monitor.

Second, a contextualizing discourse, Picturing Genital Embryogenesis addresses the biological and social-critical investigation of sexual differentiation in the human embryo.

The animation, Genital Embryogenesis, and the full paper, Picturing Genital Embryogenesis, are available on this web site.

Third, Fatemap: would you like to know what will happen?, is a theatrical, video projection construction, comprised of multiple layers of paintings on clear vinyl (paintings that represent  embryological development of the face and the genitals), through which palimpsest one views the projected video Nipples, a compilation of live performances where I draw explanations of genital development on the skin – on my body and on the bodies of friends.

My choice of locally found step ladders as supports for Fatemap: would you like to know what will happen, and my use of set-it-up, take-it-down portable materials also emphasize the theatrical, performative, contingent nature of the work – my work is play. And the role of fate, represented by the biological concept of the fatemap, is also a metonym for the theatrical, performative, contingent and unstable development of genital sex, gender and sexual identity.

By bringing the sensuous tools of picturing into the research laboratory to contribute to the rigor of the scientific research team, while, in the studio and gallery, positioning this research onto the body and into the zones of touch, sex and the erotic, my purpose is to offer more accurate social and aesthetic discriminations and adequate frames when conceptualizing and representing the process of sexual differentiation in the embryo.

Click on the image thumbnails at right to listen to an audio description of each

DOWNLOAD: Picturing Genital Embryogenesis (.doc – 53kb)


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