Beginnings are especially important when working with others. How you unfold your stories to each other can underpin the collaboration. Gray Street has opened me up to being both a mentor and a mentee on a daily basis. But the workshop is home territory and a certain amount of comfort and ease comes with that. I do know that travelling out of my comfort zone is critical for my practice, my brain and my body. Working in scientific and medical environments can sometimes feel alienating and I’ve found it’s always the human connections that melt these barriers. Over time I’ve learned to step back a little and slow down the judgement that can get in the way of learning something new. You have collaborated with Ian Gibbins for many years now. What do you feel he has brought to your practice and can you comment on what you have possibly brought to his understanding of the body and seeing through your artworks? My practice has been enriched through working with Ian and his colleagues over the course of a decade. Ian has commented that he became more aware of his teaching methods because of our discussions. As a result he would utilise his own body as a primary living resource in his teaching and encourage his students to do the same. He asked them to consider the generic nature of the body they were learning in medical school: ‘Whose body are you learning about? Is it yours?’ Generally there’s never enough time during the courses to ask such philosophical questions like this about the subject matter. But these questions are crucial. So, yes, we have both been affected in really positive ways by working together. The title of the exhibition is no surface holds, expresses a slippage, an inability to create a solid, firm or definitive view or idea. Why is this expression so essential to your work? No surface holds is a line by the French feminist Luce Irigaray, from her book This Sex Which Is Not One written in 1977. Melinda Rackham used it as a chapter heading in her book on my practice. It’s a potent piece of writing to be sure. It’s about the dissolving of boundaries between two people. I’ve chosen it as an exhibition title and the title of an installation in the show. I think I’m illusionist at best and when I make an image or an object, the catalyst is usually a very transient impression, something fleeting, perhaps just a sensation. I become deliciously absorbed in the quest to make something tangible of that sensation and yet I know its actually impossible. I work with the notion that all knowledge is fluid and can be altered by something as simple as the shifting light. You are currently a visiting scholar at the Flinders Centre for Ophthalmology, Eye and Vision Research, School of Medicine, Flinders University, undertaking a project titled The nexus between vision, the eye and perception. The works of art you have produced in response to this include ocular plants, <strong>2017</strong> and ocular trees, <strong>2017</strong>. What are the similarities you are expressing between plants and the way the eye works or looks? When I started this latest residency I had no idea how broad the subject of eyes, perception and vision could be and the diversity of disciplines involved. Over the past year I’ve watched many eye surgeries, pretended to be a patient in the waiting rooms, had my eyes imaged with every machine available at the clinic, and visited the research labs and there is still so much to investigate. This residency is proving to be a little different from my previous experiences at Flinders. I often describe my role in these environments as being a kind of thinking two-way mirror and that’s the way I’ve worked with Ian in the past. I observe broadly to begin with and ask questions, share my observations and over time we may generate questions together and that’s a really wonderful experience. The work that has evolved so far reflects a quite personal response to the structure of the eye and an inquiry into the sensation of sight. I’m beginning to understand that eyes are small miracles. I’m intrigued by the intricate networks, which connect the eye to the whole body. Also how we process light into thought; it seems light is a key ingredient for vision and perception. The collections called Ocular Plants and Ocular Trees in the exhibition have evolved organically from serendipitous connections. Recently I asked Angela Chappell, the ophthalmic photographer to take images of my retinas and we spent some time studying them on screen together. It was like gazing through a science fiction-like portal into what looked like a glowing planet covered with an arterial lattice of rivers and streams. Seeing is a great way for us to finish, as the works of art in this exhibition definitely reward those that take the time to engage. What would you hope people take away from this exhibition? I hope that people sense something of the engagement I experience when I research and reflect and make. There are some tricks of the eye and a smattering of humour in the work. I hope they become absorbed in wonder, feel a little puzzled occasionally and even have a good laugh or two along the way. Andy Warhol once said, ‘I don’t know where the real starts and the artificial stops’. Sometimes, uncertainty is delicious. JamFactory Icon <strong>2017</strong>, Catherine Truman: no surface holds, opened in Adelaide as part of the South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival before touring to eight venues nationally. The exhibition tour has been assisted by the Australian Government’s Contemporary Touring Initiative, a program of the Australia Council for the Arts. Previous page: Ongoing Being (detail), 2010 - ongoing multi media, dimensions variable. Photographer: Grant Hancock. Top right: In Preparation for Seeing: SEM Glove, Installation – objects, 2015 black cotton glove encrusted with black glass spheres, microscope slides, steel forceps, petri dishes, light pad, dimensions variable. Photographer: Grant Hancock. Right: no surface holds: Crab Claw Installation, 2015 - 17, found crab claws encrusted with glass spheres. Dimensions variable. Photographer: Grant Hancock. 22 / ISSUE 05
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