Lisa Temple-Cox

My preoccupation is with the gaps, interstices; the cognitive space that exists between our sense of self and our unconscious motivations.

 Over the course of this past year, my focus has been almost entirely head-bound. My original investigative approach was to distinguish between the head as matter, as meat, and the face as social construct. However, I believe my research interests are heading towards a more subtle, psychoanalytical terrain: namely, the head as a sign of identity, being, and consciousness itself.

My research has led me to examine life and death masks, as well as phrenological heads, classical busts, and sculptures of heads in a number of media – some quite abstract –including the work of Hirst, Quinn, and Serrano inter alia. However in keeping with previous interests exploring the Vanitas, decay, change and memory, the work I want to make has to be transient: changeable, malleable and impermanent. This is in direct contrast to my former desire to fix objects and images, make things permanent and encapsulate them; to explore process rather than product.

 Further, I want to make artworks that do not simply explore our sense of self and mortality, but something more primal, unconscious. The idea of using the kind of media I have been exploring – clay, piss, shit, milk, wine, wax, bread and fat- not only references symbolisms to do with the body, but to Kristeva’s concept of the abject – separation of subject from object, a rejection of death, and a phobia or horror that at the same time exerts a kind of cathartic pleasure in its experience.

 Freud characterises the uncanny by the experience of catching sight of oneself as a reflection, momentarily thinking it is someone else, and then having the shock of self-recognition – a moment of facing yourself as doppelganger, or double, separate and extant. What, then, could be more uncanny than coming face to face with your own disembodied head. In point of fact, the physical process of making a cast of my head has been another dislocating experience on many levels. The shaving of my hair to reveal the hitherto unseen shape and form of my skull, and the reaction of others to my hairlessness, was disconcerting: however, the experience of having my whole head encased in plaster was deeply strange - I discovered that as my face disappeared, the people around me ceased to talk to me as a person, but about me as an object.

 My interest in decay and preservation has led me naturally to the apparatuses of the natural history and medical museum. I am interested to see the way that visitors responded to the exhibits: a mixture of fascination, horror and awe. A recent collaboration with an art historian, during which we struggled with the notion of visualising theory, and contextualising practice, led to a process of attempting to make work which references the trope of metonymy: substituting parts for whole, and exploring ways of moving a visual practice from symbolism to allegory.                         

This work is ongoing. Since that project I have also been looking at ways of introducing an element of text into my current work. I am inspired by the particular sense of dislocation one feels when working in another country: early this year I made a research trip to Paris, where I visited several medical museums, most notably the Musée des Moulages at the hospital of St Louis – the largest collect of moulages in Europe – and the Musée Dupuytren, a collection of teratological specimens which includes moulages, wet specimens, and skeletons. I found that not being fluent in the language did, in fact, create a certain kind of space around me that changed the way I worked - making my self the alien, the other, created a cognitive space wherein I was linguistically alienated, but cognitively liberated. My interest in language and text I hope to explore further. 

   Having recently completed an MA, my current research is based around visual expressions of psychological ideas of self and identity, reflected through the attraction/repulsion that comes from a human fascination with remains: specifically, remains as presented by the medical museum, with its mixed message of instruction and sideshow. To this end I am currently engaged in a process of visiting certain museums in order to make work within the body of the museum itself. I hope to take the work I make in the museum back into the gallery, blurring the distinctions between one kind of display or collection and another, creating a kind of cognitive dissonance that causes the viewer to question their position as spectator. 

    Having visited many medical museums in the last few years, it occurs to me that there seems to be an uncertainly regarding the nature of these collections: the didactic purpose either concurrent or at odds with the presentation. For example, in the Hunterian, the Irish giant stands obstensibly as an example of a particular genetic disorder, displayed next to both a ‘normal’ human skeleton, and one distorted by another genetic disease. Yet it is the human story behind the acquisition of these remains that continues to interest most visitors.

    Hunter was a proponent of comparative anatomy, and his collection contains many and varied animal preparations alongside the human. The display of these has itself evolved over time, and since the loss of many exhibits during the war has forsaken the dark wooden cabinet of the Victorian era for wall to ceiling glass and light. Next week I go to visit yet another medical museum, this time in Philadelphia – this, apparently – like the Dupuytren – happy in its Victorian aesthetic. It would be interesting to undertake a kind of research that I would call ‘comparative museology’. I wonder what kind of differences these styles of display make, to the viewer.    

 I am reminded of the BP Classified exhibition at the Tate Britain, which opened with Dion’s ‘Thames Dig’ cabinet, and ended by one’s passing through the sterility of  Hirst’s ‘Pharmacy’ into the dark, woody, incense-laden fetishism of the Chapman brother’s installation ‘The Chapman Family Collection’. Adventures in classification indeed! Watch this (heterological) space.