UCL Exhibition Review: Mirrored Anatomies

Jerry Yi Chang, Untitled. Photograph by Rongyu Lin.

Sam Vladimirsky reviews UCL Anatomy’s second art exhibition, Mirrored Anatomies.

The pioneer of Great War plastic surgery, Harold Gillies, once described his practice as a “strange new art.” Reconstructing the face and body was inherently thought of as a creative act. His is but one example of the blurry intersection between art and medicine. Eighteenth century museums of anatomy hired sculptors to produce wax models of the human form; and before them, Renaissance painters dissected corpses to render the subjects of their paintings more lifelike. Oh, the irony. 

 Last week, students from thirty universities and institutes across London were featured in the pop-up exhibition Mirrored Anatomies — the second annual anatomical art exhibition organized by the UCL Anatomy Society. “The idea was to initiate a tradition,” says Exhibition Director Claudia Liang, “an annual art exhibition where we might see the intersection between anatomical science and art, encouraging students from diverse backgrounds to display their creative work.”

The inspiration originally came from dance, says Liang, “and the idea [that] we can mirror each other's movements,” much how “our brain contains ‘mirror’ neurons to facilitate that.” 

 Liang and her team put out an open call for submissions to investigate the symmetries of the external body, the asymmetry of its internal organs, and the body’s parallels across nature, art, and design. In what proved to be a nuanced take on a popular subject, they assembled a magnificently eclectic group of medical students and artists working across disciplines and in all media, from loosely figurative screen prints, to a clay model of two livers no larger than thumbnail. 

Lucie Gourmet,Alzheimer's Disease; Heartheterotaxy; Scoliosis. Photograph by Samuel Vladimirsky.

Sophie Clarke, Hidden Creatures.Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Samuel Vladimirsky.

 Some offered more literal interpretations of the theme than others. A particular standout is Lucie Gourmet, a third-year human genetics student at UCL, whose three black pencil drawings highlight the symmetry and asymmetry of degenerative disorders. Her asymmetrical juxtaposition of a healthy brain with one affected by Alzheimer’s — characterized by the loss of neurons in the gray matter — was a striking and poignant representation of a creeping, devastating memory loss. 

 Others turned to phantasmagoria to create fictional anatomies of impossible flora and fauna. Sophie Clarke, a first-year illustration for communications major, imagined the skeletal systems of mythical reptiles and horned things, saber-toothed beasts, and tentacled critters with names like the “Libdine,” or my personal favourite, the “Gula.” Labeled diagrams of the creatures’ internal and external selves were accompanied by a background story, which, while fictional, mirrors the motivations of the more scientific works in the room: that is, to let the world behold “the weird and wonderful hidden creatures of the Earth.”

Liva Donina, Untitled. Photograph by Samuel Vladimirsky.

Yaning Wu, Do No Harm. Photograph by Samuel Vladimirsky.

Yaning Wu, Bent Not Broken. Photograph by Samuel Vladimirsky.

Artists like Liva Donina and Yaning Wu explore the theme through the lens of technology. Donina, who has always been told she bears a striking resemblance to her sister, painted a highly stylized screenshot of a FaceTime call between the two. The mirrored anatomy she chose to represent traverses the frontiers of technology and biology. In three works on paper, Wu shows off her back brace and spinal fusion scars in an intimate take on her life with scoliosis. “Many patients are proud of their wonky anatomy and the devices used to correct it,” she says. In Do No Harm, five hands hold utilitarian tools intended to cut, screw, pierce, and drill — clever stand-ins for medical paraphernalia that sharply critique “the costly, painful, and often overprescribed procedure,” leading to inequity in the treatment process at tremendous financial and physical cost.  A second piece offers up a sliver of a silver lining. Bent Not Broken, which borrows its title and motifs from a cheesy slogan espoused by the “Curvy Girls,” the artist’s support group, is embodied here by a hand holding up a back-braced skeleton. 

Not every work of art on view was visual. In fact, one of the strongest pieces consisted of nothing more than five short paragraphs on a printed page: Claudia Graham’s “Studying Anatomy.” Graham, a Masters student in Gender, Society, and Representation, employs personal anecdotes and clever word play to craft a compelling case against the “clunky prose and exclusive terminology” that so often relegates the study of the body to a purely scientific realm. “Biology didn’t come naturally,” she says ironically, “I’d memorized all the right words and sentences and reproduced them on the exam papers, but none of it joined up.” The piece is laced with subtle humanist undertones that dance around the idea of the soul (she reduces the brain to a “mass of squidgy selfhood” and argues that the body has “earned the right to some mystery.”) Touching upon the interdisciplinary nature of the exhibition and its participants, Graham suggests that the impossibility of fully knowing the human body has been the very impetus for both artists and anatomists to share her amazement for the “brilliant whiteness of bone.” “What we’re striving for is not so different after all,” she concedes, “an understanding of what it is to be human.” 

Sabrina Harverson, Mirrored Moment. Photograph by Samuel Vladimirsky.

Poppy Pierce, A part of you. Photograph by Samuel Vladimirsky.

A collective desire to understand that which makes us human is what ultimately brought this cohort of brush-wielding med students and anatomically oriented artists together in the Jeremy Bentham Room last week. I left convinced that this humble exhibition carved its own small niche in the history of art and medicine. There's a reason why the golden gauche backdrop to Sabrina Harverson's Mirrored Momento Mori resembles gold leaf, used by medieval scribes in their illuminated manuscripts. It is no coincidence that Poppy Pierce’s pen strokes are almost impossible to differentiate from actual human musculature, or that through the medium of photography, Louie Hext found parallels between human form and its architectural counterparts.

 "So swept away with the grand themes of love, ambition, and desire in my books," recalls Graham of her days absorbed by the arts, "I'd forgotten that greatest humanity of all. The body is the most universal theme we have."

Louie Hext, Bodies and Buildings. Photograph by Rongyu Lin.