Jennifer Willet and Kira O’Reilly (2009). Photographer: Bernd Bohm.

With special thanks to Adam Zaretsky who conceived and realised the glovebox and initiated the invitation and opportunity for us to use it.  Thanks also to WAAG Society who supported and facilitated the venure: http://www.waag.org/news/6019

My own very particular thanks to Jennifer who invited me to collaborate with her again on our second photographic series. She was also responsible for some of the fundraising that supported my visit to Amsterdam as was the case with our previous collaboration. Both situations emerged from a convergence of methods in our respective practices of similar visual and performative methodologies with respect to our presences and activities within the laboratory and the biosciences. But equally both methodologies have developed from somewhat different processes and discourses but with very similar sets of concerns. These lively convergences and divergences of thoughts, actions and language are largely what allow and create such a layered set of meanings in our brief encounters in the actual period of making. Several years of professional dialogue and friendship beginning whilst both artists in residence in SymbioticA and continuing despite very brief periods of actually seeing one another laid a foundation for these works. 

structure made from cable ties and garden spider (araneus diadematus) silk spinnings in a confined space.

fertilised egg shell shattered and spilt the 3 day old embryo.

opened up egg showing a 5 day embryo in the top left hand corner

 DISSECTIONS:

Shots taken through the black dark room curtain that cloisters the window of the door of the ‘room of appearances’ or the tissue culture room that is part of Janet Smith’s lab and where I work.This room has been very carefully conceived and considered by Janet, it’s feel and tone altogether different from the other tissue culture labs I’ve been in.

St Veronica wiped the bloodied face of Christ on calvery, her veil took up his imprint and some centuries down the line, she became the patron saint of photography. The blackness of the darkroom curtain of course absorbs all light, all appearances, it cannot reflect back but is the negative and this case the occulting figure in the camera obscura (dark room), the obscurer. The play between light and dark, development and appearance often seems analogous to the appearance and development of the cultures that are cultivuated within - and to the technologies of appearance that are used to display and interpret cellular and molecular information. From microscopy, to histology staining, to western blots. Exploitations of lucida be it optical, objective, fluorescence, antibodies, bioluminescence.