This month, we are visiting acclaimed Scottish artist Christine Borland’s first solo show in Glasgow in almost two decades which sees the artist create a new cast of a 19th-century anatomical work as part of an ongoing interrogation of the relationship between art and medicine.
Sixteen years after the seminal exhibition, From Life, at Glasgow’s Tramway which brought Christine Borland’s work to wide public attention, the artist presents a new solo show in the city, Cast From Nature. Christine Borland’s new work, created during a Glasgow Sculpture Studios Production Residency, takes as its starting point, a striking fibreglass sculpture, From Nature (credited to John Goodsir F.R.C.S Edinburgh) which is part of the permanent collection of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh.
Cast From Nature explores and tests the performative interest in the relationship between doctors and patients as seen in her recent work. The piece will reflect on historical aspects of the anatomical process, the relationship between the early anatomist, his subject (most commonly a criminal, fresh from the gallows) and his ‘audience’ bearing witness to a process presented as ‘educational’ yet simultaneously a punishment worse than death.
Throughout the exhibition, Borland has cast the damaged From Nature through a series of public events. The process is streamed into a form of theatre located in the GSS main gallery reflecting the mediation of the body that is part of everyday life in the 21st century. Elsewhere in the gallery, as the casting proceeds, Borland will show a record of the process to date, pointing the way towards the future evolution of the project. Once the mould is complete, she will create a new version of From Nature.
