Breath Lab, 2019
Wall adhesive vinyl
I was invited to spend time exploring the History and Heritage Collection at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital and produce artwork reflecting on it. In my first days here, I opened all the doors and cupboards and drawers and systematically took a visual inventory. While there is a written list that records the contents of the Collection, my preference is always for direct sensory engagement where possible: the look, feel, touch, smell of the object are all ways of knowing about the object. Amongst the myriad photos and portraits and honour boards, I found well-worn anatomical models, a complete skeleton, defunct building signs, a tea set, baby bottles from various eras, educational posters, superseded medical equipment and all sorts of strangely assembled objects.
I found myself drawn to the laboratory glassware, each piece hand-blown and precisely calibrated to carry out some mysterious purpose in a highly controlled laboratory environment. Scientific glassblowing has been integral to the development of chemistry, pharmacology, electronics and physics in instruments such as Galileo’s thermometer and Edison’s light bulb. The glass pieces in the History and Heritage Collection have long since retired from their useful lives, but remain solidly evocative in this age of disposable plastic and computerised analysis.
I was also drawn to some lengths of tubing and strange canisters and gauges that I initially mistook for more laboratory equipment, but were in fact outdated anaesthetics equipment. While distinctively different in appearance from the glassware, there was a compelling liveliness in the assortment of tubing and oddly shaped cases that intrigued me.
Working with images of these objects I created intuitive collages in black and white, to help visually unite the disparate materials. Slowly the unifying factor became apparent after the visual and material differences were pared back: glass blown by breath, and equipment through which so many breaths have flowed.
Breathing, the defining action between life and death, supplies essential oxygen to and removes waste gases from every cell in our bodies. The quality of breathing also affects our brain function and behaviour. Inhalation and exhalation, nasal or mouth breathing all influence and respond to our emotional currents and memory recall.
This body of work is a series of nonsensical experiments that play with relics of this ordinarily invisible and ephemeral process.
Images: Craige Andrae