Image by Laura Splan

NS: In recent years, many artists have started using biological specimens or biomedical imagery in their work. What is it that attracts artists to these fields?

SPLAN (S): Artists, like everyone else in our culture, have been exposed more and more to biomedical imagery in their everyday lives. It has become part of our mainstream visual landscape. As artists mine the rest of their culture for inspiration, this imagery is just another part of what they find. There have been more recent shifts in our access and exposure to biomedical imagery that have influenced the increase in artists referencing the imagery prominently in their work. Some of those shifts have been influenced by biotechnological advances [such as] cloning of Dolly, stem cell research, bioterrorism (anthrax in the mail), FDA legalization of TV drug ads in 1997, emergence of antimicrobial household products, and development of Internet databases of biomedical imaging and information.

It should also be noted that historically artists have drawn inspiration from nature in anything from landscape painting to playing with the physics of light. Many contemporary artists’ interest in biomedical imagery is actually quite formal and traditional in their approach to the material while others are more concerned with metaphor and concept in their use of the imagery.

NS: You started out studying biology in college. How did you decide that you did not want to pursue a career in science, but turned to art instead?

S: While I had great interest and respect for the biology program at UC Irvine, I was blown away by the elective art classes I was taking. The art program was highly conceptual and political. I was learning about a lot of things relating to feminism and identity politics for the first time, and ultimately felt more engaged with political art at the time. The concepts of art and artist were really opened up for me, and art became a venue to explore all of my diverse interests which eventually came back to biology in a very roundabout way.

My choice was also a failure to recognize the different directions that a career in bioscience could mean. With the emergence of so much bioart, I now see that biologist can be as malleable a term as artist.

I also knew that I was absolutely not interested in participating in animal testing and experimentation, which I foresaw as being problematic for me in the future with a lot of biological sciences course work.

NS: As scientists, we are trained to develop hypotheses about a particular problem and then test them through rational experimental design. The whole process is very structured, but at the same time there is creativity in the way experiments are designed. Can you give us some insight into your creative process? Do you think that there are any similarities in the way artists and scientists approach a problem?

S: Scientific experimentation and problem solving can be highly creative, and art-making can be extremely robotic and methodical. If I had to differentiate the two, I would say that science’s creativity is based on technical and scientific information, while art’s scientific experiments and methods are based on creativity.

My creative process has, of late, been very materials-driven with a consistent theme of ambivalence towards the human body and its biological function. First, I decide I want to use a particular material (blood, cosmetic facial peel, lace, or doilies). I try to do something with the material that is new and often relating to domesticity, femininity, or craft. I then examine the historical and contemporary significance of that material. I may allude to these meanings and ideas in the imagery of the work. My artistic practice involves a lot of experimentation and trial and error in order to figure out what works both technically and conceptually in the final piece.

NS: At the NYAS conference, I was constantly aware of a fundamental difference in the way people were thinking and talking about art. On one hand, many of the scientists kept bringing up aesthetics—the idea of beautiful images taken by the Hubble telescope, etc.; on the other hand, there was the purely conceptual rhetoric of Jens Hauser, whose presentation focused on projects such as Designer Hymens by vivoLabs where artists use tissue culture to explore sexuality. These are two very different approaches! Where does your work lie on this continuum?

S: That’s a wonderful and true observation! It ultimately begs the questions, “is something art because it’s beautiful?” and likewise, “is something still art if it has no beauty?” I feel, and actually hope, that my work lies in the conceptual territory rather than the aesthetic. My priority is to evoke thought and ideas, not pleasure. However, what I’ve found over the years is that aesthetics serve a role in conceptual practice. The more beautiful or seductive the image, the more someone will look at it. The more someone looks at it, the more they will peel back the underlying layers of meaning.

Image by Laura Splan

S: Not so much shock as repulsion, discomfort, and horror in relation to the human body. I often try to create an experience that begins here and then unfolds into something comfortable or beautiful. I approach imagery from the other side, in which I use the beautiful and comfortable imagery to mask something more disturbing. The trick is negotiating the mask into one that can be controlled by the viewer. They can go back and forth between the two and develop an awareness of the malleability of this experience and their own perceptions.

A lot of social construction is about masking and denying basic biological functions. I’m interested … in creating an experience in which the viewer is left with some sort of control of what they perceive, so that if they choose to see a doily that can be all they see. But they can also choose to really look at the structure and think about how that is a virus and think about how that makes them feel and what their relationship is to that fear of the microbial world in domestic space.

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