Christine Borland: Cast From Nature Sitting in a white-walled cube at Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Christine Borland is in the final stretch of her production residency, and only a few weeks away from her first Glasgow solo show in 16 years. The unit is one of over 40 artists’ studios, tantalizingly generic on the outside, but each one home to a multitude of creative secrets. The contents of Borland’s unit are a little creepy. A life-sized medical mannequin lies naked, face down on the floor, left where he fell shortly before my arrival. A number of heads occupy a table, one with plastic arteries hanging loose from the neck. The wall is adorned with images including an uncomfortably convincing replica crash victim, and a flamboyant 19th century sculpture of a flayed man. Borland, by contrast, is welcoming and calm. She sits at a desk complete with laptop, printer and phone, in a way which suggests that this is the real focus of the studio, and not the Frankensteinian bodies lying around it. A one-time Turner Prize nominee, Borland is a product of Glasgow School of Art’s celebrated Environmental Art department. For twenty years she has steered a steady course through the medical establishment, homing in on unnoticed details and tracking down long-lost information with a detective’s eye. The artist is best known for restoring dignity to those poor lost souls whose bodies have become anonymous fodder for medical science. She has had forensic reconstructions made from off-the-shelf skulls, and has told the story of a woman whose cultured cells now outnumber those she had in life. It is the contemporary art equivalent of giving the disenfranchised a decent burial. Borland’s latest inspiration comes in the shape of 19th century sculpture, From Nature, which Edinburgh surgeon, John Goodsir, is said to have cast directly from a flayed, dissected body. This dead man – nobody knows who he was – had his skin peeled back from the jawbone to the pelvis, revealing the musculature underneath. Unlike today’s matter-of-fact teaching props, Goodsir’s specimen was arched theatrically across a support, in tribute to Michelangelo’s Pietà. A fibreglass copy is on permanent display in Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons, but when Borland asked to borrow the plaster cast from which it was copied, she was surprised by the response. “Nobody really knew where it was,” she says. “There was a lot of embarrassment that the thing couldn’t be found. That always makes me more determined, so instead of sitting here using all the resources of the sculpture studios, I was on the phone, e-mailing.” Borland eventually tracked down the sculpture to the cellars of Edinburgh University’s Anatomy Museum. “I was like a child in a sweetie shop,” she recalls. “There are casts of organs in every conceivable material: papier maché, plaster casts, the curator told me that he’s got a box of knitted organs…and then in a corner, there was the sculpture, all broken and unloved, and covered in years’ worth of dust.” The artist plans to give this sculpture the attention it needs, first by fixing its broken legs, and then by recasting it with the help of a team from Glasgow Sculpture Studios. “What I want to do,” she explains, “is start the process of casting this figure when the show starts, and slightly by necessity there will be a performance element built in.” Though her three-month residency will officially be over, Borland will spend the five month exhibition making her work in the full glare of the public eye. The artist plans to build an arena in the Glasgow Sculpture Studios gallery, much like the steep, circular anatomy theatres of the 18th century. From here, viewers can watch her slow, painstaking work of fixing and casting the sculpture much as they might have watched a famous anatomist at work in Leiden or Padua. “The casting process will be a public performance,” she says, “so I’m activating the whole space as a sculpture.” This is a first for Borland: she has never before played a performing role in her work, but it doesn’t seem to phase her. She plans to put herself at one remove, by working behind the scenes, and streaming a live feed onto screens in the theatre. This is inspired by her experience of the medical school at Glasgow University, where students practice on actors or mannequins while peers and teachers watch them on CCTV. At the medical school, Borland “became fascinated that performance – as in communication skills – is an enormous part of the curriculum. From the moment students go into first year, they’re learning about body language and eye contact.” It’s the cracks in the clinical façade which interest Borland though, where she finds something emotionally lacking. While she is impressed by the new emphasis on bedside manners, she is disturbed by the emotional distance created by replica patients. CCTV, for her, is “another layer of simulation”, which will be echoed in her new work, a live feed, of a new cast, of an old cast, of a theatrically posed body. You might expect Borland, with her emphasis on the dignity of the human being, to be making a public statement against human dissection, but in fact she takes the opposite view. “By getting medical students to do dissection,” she says, “they have to confront a whole load of emotional issues…it counteracts some of that numbing stuff that happens when you’re working with models and mannequins.” It is some of these models and mannequins which are lying around the artist’s studio. It’s not so much their hi-tech sophistication which has fascinated Borland in recent years, but their lack of physical appeal. “The mannequins are just aesthetically horrible,” she tells me. “They are really ugly lumps of rubber, plastic, latex, and computer gubbins; the students can’t get any emotional learning from working with these things.” Last year in Belfast, Borland focussed on three mannequin heads, known in the trade as Resuss Annie, Choking Charlie, and – cast from a real crash victim – Mr Hurt Head. She recast them in white plaster, and filmed them as they dried under glass domes. The heads disappeared as their domes steamed up, and slowly reappeared as the vapour condensed. In the process, the once clunky, inhuman props began to look like living, breathing human beings, or at least memories of them, and in Borland’s typically understated way, the numb, clinical gaze was challenged. She is hoping to achieve something similar with her 19th century flayed man. From Nature, explains Borland, “is an art object; a beautiful sculpture. But then we’re many steps removed from a dissected figure and all the reality of that. From the moment it’s dissected and then there’s a decision made to pose it like that, all these distancing mechanisms have happened to make it into a work of art.” Borland’s task is to reintroduce us to the man who became this simultaneously beautiful and repellent work of art. “There don’t appear to be any records of who this body was,” she says, “or how it was obtained, so I’m hoping that will be a parallel investigation, happening at the same time as I’m doing the physical work here.” As well as doing her best to rediscover the man’s identity, Borland will invite us to observe the careful recasting of his body, placing the final cast to dry under glass, as with the Belfast heads, and filming it. “Hopefully through getting people to look at it closely as it goes through this transformative process,” says Borland, “I can revisit and tap into the realities of the person that was there, once upon a time, whether or not I actually manage to find out anything about who they were.” Bringing art and anatomy together like this is far from new. Early anatomy theatres would bear paintings and inscriptions around the walls. “Art was thought to be a way to remind the viewer of their humanity,” explains Borland, “and the humanity of the subject.” This belief lies at the heart of Borland’s work, and though she employs an almost clinically light touch, her art is always quietly beautiful. I venture to suggest that this is an old-fashioned approach to art, and Borland doesn’t argue. “I think I’m a pretty old fashioned kind of person,” she admits. “I think you can engage people so much more quickly if you’ve got something that appeals to the senses,” she explains, “and even though it might be a facile kind of engagement at first, it does pull you into a deeper consideration. “The other side of the coin is always going to be there as well,” she adds, “that there can be a distancing thing, because you’re objectifying through art. I’m constantly trying to negotiate my way through both of these things,” she says. “That’s recurred again and again over the past 16 years of making work – hopefully there’s not a easy answer, or I’ve been wasting my time all these years!
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