What I learned: Bone is basically a bunch of calcium crystals grown on collagen strands.
What is so exciting about this for me?
Basic Context: I've been intuitively developing a creation process that I'm calling mock ossification. Until today, I didn't realize my process had hard science truth to it. I will get to explaining this all throughout the blog as the days go by. You can subscribe or follow the blog to see the research and creation unfold. My mock ossification work is a component of a larger project that I've received generous SSHRC funding for this year as part of my Master's thesis work at Concordia University, and which will lead towards my future continued work in creative tissue engineering at SymbioticA. My project will also incorporate digital technology in my ongoing investigation of what I've dubbed digital psychogeography, the simultaneous existence of a physical and twin digital plane and its effects on our emotions and thinking about spatial reality (as in, the landscape and what I call the e-scape).
I've been invited to do a three-month residency at SymbioticA in 2014 to research what I hope will result in some very exciting and innovative bio-art. Oron Catts, the founder/director of SymbioticA and former Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School, will supervise my research. I was led to this residency opportunity after I was selected to participate in a three-day tissue engineering workshop this past May (2013) at the Pelling Lab at the University of Ottawa, with Oron Catts and Andrew Pelling. The work I participated in during that workshop was profoundly life-altering for me as an artist and individual. I realized, full-on epiphany-style, that everything in my life and professional practice up to that point had clearly led me to this highly specialized work.
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| I found this microscopic image of calcium crystals that reminded me of the image of my work I'm using as the background image for this blog. My blog image is the side view of a rolled up 20 ft smocked roll of waxed paper that I created in 2012. |
When I was a seven year-old kid, my parents took me on an extended, wild road trip adventure across the North American continent, from the east coast to the west coast. One of our adventure breaks along the way was to roam about the Badlands of North Dakota. It was a dusty, barren place, but my mother managed to unearth a treasure amid the empty landscape. She saw something sticking up out of the hard-packed clay ground and kicked at it until it broke loose a little, and then she dug it up. It was a fossilized skull of some unidentified animal, complete with darkened molars and empty fang sockets. To this day, I still have no idea what this petrified animal could have been but it is small, fitting into the palm of my hand. This single event shaped my entire life's passion. When asked in grade 3 what I most wanted to be when I grew up, I stated confidently, "An archaeologist."
I did not become an archaeologist, but an artist specializing in fibre and material studies, predominantly utilizing bone, flesh, hair and fur in my practice. Till now, I have worked with dead matter, bringing it back to life through mythic, artistic reconstruction. This is both a spiritual and physical practice. Naturally my next step is to literally bring materials to life through wet biology processes, to construct new semi-living (and perhaps still mythic) artistic objects. It amazes me that I have the tools and resources to do this as an artist-researcher.
My research will be focused at Concordia University this academic year, partially independently in my private studio, as well as through peer discussion, hopefully some consultation with professor Tagny Duff, as well as eventually (maybe next year) in the new tissue engineering lab that Tagny is establishing at Concordia if she will agree to have me in!
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| I'm particularly interested in this as a calcium (bony) growth that resembles knitting. This is a fossilized heliastar (starfish). |
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