Written for the artist’s exhibition Illuminating the Self at Vande and Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, with Susan Aldworth, 16 Jan – 29 Feb 2020.
Andrew Carnie has established a highly distinct area for practice, yet its boundaries are fluid and constantly changing, constantly under question. It is not illustrative; it is yet not even emotive, as such. It asks: how do we re-think being human? Carnie aims to ‘make a piece that allows us to have purchase on our feelings, that sets us to reflect on how we think about the world.’[1] It is important, he says, to raise these questions, to challenge the usual public opinion, to toggle between fear and complacency about scientific breakthroughs. The practice is, of course, separate from the practice of science itself; Carnie has described himself as an interloper…[2]
Against the grain of categorising visual artists as purveyors of a single concept, or one chosen medium, Carnie’s work encompasses enormous range, possible partly because of his prolific outputs, from tech-heavy, immersive light installations animated by slide-dissolve sequences, from constructions and accreted painting, right through to watercolours, from the delicate to the surprisingly robust. Time is a crucial factor. His relationship with technology embraces the very slow as well as fast new discoveries and adaptations. His use of slide projectors and the slow dissolve in immersive environments slows down the consumption of the work: considerable time is needed to witness the ‘reveal’ of cumulative slices of the human body and an exploration its systems; and a sense of temporal scale is further disrupted by analogies between human and dendritic forms. (Magic Forest, 2002) More recently, he has rediscovered a playful approach, a licence to experiment in a lighter way that has come with maturity, to enjoy the processes of making and encourage an openness to unexpected outcomes and new ways of rendering ideas. This gives rise to the impression of a thoroughly biological practice, in more than one sense: the output of a visibly restless, energetic individual who is forever drawing, it is a teeming bloodstream of parallel ideas and forms, in constant Darwinian competition.
There is a social and professional energy at work too, a pragmatic resourcefulness which has developed into an integrated, coherent practice offering mutual benefit to the science it reflects. Carnie has found that scientists value art, that they are inclusive by culture. Repeat collaborators such as Richard Wingate, King’s College neuroscientist and Head of Anatomy, have extended his reach and his influence: Carnie now teaches King’s biomedical students 3D printing for medical purposes, and recasts what they do through artistic eyes.
Carnie’s desire for connection and cross-disciplinary activity has been the catalyst for his involvement in an international forum of artists who share a similar curiosity about the human condition and its relationship with science, who investigate the moral issues around technology and medicine, and whose transdisciplinary practice is immersed in the research lab. These include Adam Zaretsky (US), who investigates the moral issues around biotech and recognising microbes, insects and plants as creative agents, and places himself in lab conditions as a subject for study; Pascale Pollier-Green (BE/UK), who works with anatomical medical modelling as the basis for her sculptures; Marta de Menezes (PT), who uses biology and biotechnology as new art media, editing genomes of genetic modified organisms to ‘revert’ them to wild type; Nina Sellars (AU), who creates anatomical imagery using new technology and harvested body fluids; performance artist Stelarc (AU), who creates new interfaces with the body through physical intervention, including extreme body modification; and Helen Piner, who has worked with cardiac physiologist Mike Shattock to re-animate a pig heart at Dublin’s Science Gallery.
Carnie has used his remarkable breadth of facility to address an issue most pertinent to our age: the question of what it is like to occupy a human body in an age of breakthroughs in understanding of its functions and weaknesses, of medical hybridity, experiments in transhumanism, and rumours about them. Some of the great scientific breakthroughs of the last 15 years have been human-scale: broaching issues of the brain and depression; organ replacement; nanotechnology deployed for therapeutic purposes; gene therapy. These raise issues which lie beyond empirical results and objective successes: of culture and ethics; emotional response; the effects on social interactions and family units; and ideas of boundary, in the context of heart-transplantation, (Heart Project, part of Hybrid Bodies, An Artistic Investigation into the Experience of Heart Transplantation, 2015-18).
With his early training in chemistry, zoology and psychology, Carnie is well-suited to the field, and has also adopted it for pragmatic reasons. The habit of encouraging artistic research as an adjunct to scientific and medical research has been supported by foundations such as Wellcome for around 20 years. They seek not just wide understanding of health and medicine, but a broader social involvement, which notably includes the work of artists. In the last decade this impulse has led to the establishment of the global network of Science Galleries, funded by Google, to publicly showcase the rich territory between science and art. Artistic practice has shifted from being an interpretive tool, deployed post-research, to a research tool in itself, allowing new perspectives. Carnie has been a key figure in the field internationally throughout this period, and has seen it grow into a broader, more inclusive practice. His work has both stimulated and witnessed this ‘collider’ phenomenon, ‘accelerating the impulses of art and science together, to creative/revealing effect’.[3]
[1] http://www.medinart.eu/works/andrew-carnie/
[2] ibid.
[3] Michael John Gorman , outgoing CEO of Science Gallery International ,in an address to MuseumNext in Dublin, 20 January 2018. https://www.museumnext.com/article/building-the-global-science-gallery-network/
sara roberts 