Today I spend the morning at the In The Flesh exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and then the afternoon having a meeting with a Senior Curator at the National Museum Kirsten Wehner about the Australian Institute of Anatomy collection which consists of thousands of human and animal specimens preserved in golden fluid inside glass jars and is a part of the National Museum collection. The work in In The Flesh (Piccinini, Mueck etc) is an experience of contemporary figurative art that explores the concept of humanness. and I could connect, I could see them twitch, I sympathised, I empathised, I saw myself and my family. Later, looking at the specimens in the Anatomy Collection, although I knew I was looking at a collection of animal specimens, I felt something human about them. Echidnas brains and spinal chords in a jar, dissected organs, miniatures of the same organs that exist inside of us. Life preserved in a captured state, reduced to a specimen in a jar, in which I saw some human parallel. Whether I saw the human in the specimens, or the animal in us, Im not sure yet, but the connection was there
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 05:49:41 +0000
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