Weeks later the phone rings, it’s the editor, so I go and look at the crisp slides of the work and collect another copy of the catalogue. Still nothing. But it is not until I read the artist’s words that a response is evoked and memories are recalled, of studying alone in a quiet room in Otago Medical School.
Desks surrounded by racks of jars containing preserved two-headed babies, disembowelled bodies and opened skulls. Bodies with unravelled nerves and veins (like an elbow of a favourite jumper, handmade from the house paddock flock). Shoulders with muscular systems demystified, heads with only half faces, the other half veins and eyeball socket and….
Further back to six or seven, the weekly sheep kill; lessons on skinning, disembowelment, and removal of the prized kidney and livers.
Forward now to February 1993, to drawing from another preserved collection in the UWA medical school, during my second year at Edith Cowan. Memories of a brother’s sobbing/gasping ribs….
On and on, these memories come after reading the catalogue. Yet I had none of these responses to the exhibition, nor while viewing the slides or even sketching briefly from them. I’d conclude that the artist’s and Linda Marie Walker’s poetic words in the catalogue were more evocative than the work.
And it puzzles me.
A day later at a fellow artist’s thirtieth birthday, on the twilight lit lawn and the answer comes. The difference lies in the between the experiential and the academic. Sue Lorraine’s disembody exhibition is too close in visual imagery to medical text images, rather than the actual subjective experience of drawing from a real dead human body.
How would you respond to a real, lifeless human body? How would you respond when approaching a human body that has been sliced, peeled, frayed and preserved? What emotional, intellectual and spiritual responses do you have when there is no funeral or ritual preparation for this experience? What of the risk that you may recognise the face behind the glass?
This exhibition neither asks, nor answers, these questions. The objects and images of them are refined, slick and abstract, conveying nothing more than textbook images. The hand, and the heart, is removed. There is nothing of what Sue Lorraine feels about what she describes in the catalogue as “wet specimens preserved in alcohol and clove oil”.