Brochure for Art Exhibition at New Hall Art Collection

RE PR OD U C TI V I TI E S REMAKING LIFE – AN EXHIBITION

INTRODUCTION The last century has seen dramatic changes in the way in which plant and human life is reproduced. Yet in spite of the intimate relation between plants and ourselves, the current biotechnological remaking of both of our reproductivities are rarely brought into dialogue.

What does the reinvention of plant cultivation tell us about the art of crafting new life forms?

How do the carefully crafted cultures of in vitro life reflect the larger worlds around them? And how can the visual arts help us to reflect on new forms of artificial life in the lab? By linking tissue culture, horticulture, photography, painting and performance, Reproductivities engages these questions to introduce new ways of seeing ourselves and our world.

ESSAY Reproductivities draws

Recent technological means of modifying human,

connections between

plant and animal reproduction share many elements

different ways of

in common with the visual arts at the level of both form and content. Reproductivities explores how

reproducing life – in

life is being remade, reframed and reconceived

plants, in humans, and

in contemporary society with an emphasis on the

in art – to ask how

artisanal and aesthetic dimensions of this process.

Linking in vitro cell technologies, horticulture,

the carefully crafted

photography, painting and performance, the

cultures of in vitro life

exhibition asks not only how new biotechniques such

reflect the larger worlds around them.

as cell culture or genetic modification are understood, but how they introduce new ways of seeing ourselves and our world.

At a time of dramatic, widespread biotechnological changes in reproduction, with IVF now accounting for millions of children worldwide, and high-tech bioinnovations controlling the reproduction of plants, animals and micro-organisms, a reflection on the relation between these technologised reproductivities is matter of both ontological wonder and political urgency.

In Reproductivities, we seek to draw attention to the striking and unexpected connections between human and plant, as well as in vivo and in vitro, reproduction. By combining and contrasting these fields of life-as-art, Reproductivities juxtaposes old and new reproductive technologies of agricultural breeding, genomics, gardening and IVF. We seek to move beyond an isolated focus on the human in our reflection on reproductive technologies and consider instead how the inextricable entanglement of biologies and technologies propels the emergence of many kinds of artisanal life. In doing so, this project critiques an enlightenment separation between the human and nature – an old, but still highly influential binary construct that lies

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at the root of the current planetary ecological

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crisis – and instead invites the viewer to consider

T H E A RT O F B O B

the mutual co-emergence of plants and humans,

# 6 ( 2 0 1 6) m o d i f i e d image based on original slide from Robert Edwards

of maize and mammals, as well as art and life.

Through photography, painting, performance art and horticulture, we explore the ways in which we reproduce with, alongside and through one another.

The link between human reproduction and plant

highlighting the process of reproduction being

reproduction, between tissue culture and horticulture,

remade – again. It is thus through the form, not only

is at the heart of Gina Glover’s and Camilla Lyon’s

the content, that reproduction becomes the subject

work. Both represent the subject of IVF through

of these paintings. The imperfect replicas produced

depictions of blooming and blossoming plants

by the reproductive fold highlight the play between

and fertile seeds of life. In The ART of Bob, Glover

repetition and difference which lies at the heart of

recomposes Nobel laureate and IVF inventor Robert

human, plant and artistic reproduction alike.

Edward’s microphotographs of early embryonic life to gesture toward both hand-made inner worlds and the abstract realms of the scientific imagination. Through this recombinant artistry, Glover recontextualises the inside and the outside of an in vitro cell, projecting a microscopic vision of IVF through the hand-drawn marks that gesture outside of the dish and beyond the laboratory’s walls. Combining the embryonic cell cycle and the seasonal life cycles symbolised by seeds and trees, the work integrates the microfocus on human cells with glimpses of the abundant, albeit ever-imperilled, life cycles that surround hand-made cellular beginnings.

In Camilla Lyon’s work, the careful cultivation of garden plants is juxtaposed with the culture of in vitro fertilisation procedures. Developed during a residency at Murray Edwards College, which coincided with the artist’s own experience of several IVF cycles, Lyon’s vivid watercolour paintings of plants re-present cultured reproduction in a different frame. Like Glover’s bright white blossoms contrasting against a blue sky, Lyon’s paper’s fold, or hinge, functions as the mechanism through which plants are copied,

Glover likewise engages the reproductivity of form through her bright blue cyanotypes of prenatal life in Chemical Reproduction. Here it is not the fold, but the repeated shape of the images that matches the subject of technologised reproduction.

In order to produce these images, Glover has redeployed the mineral ingredients of the IVF culture medium, in which embryos are grown in glass, and uses them to make these salt prints. The material means of human reproduction are thus transposed to artistic reproduction.

The play between tissue culture and horticulture returns in Ex Ovo Omnia, or ‘everything from the egg’.

In this work, Glover arranges languid, pale flowers in Petri dishes, resembling overgrown, fleshy cells.

Displayed in round glass domes, their presentation at once imitates the globular shape of the cellular orb and acts as a mirror onto the viewer. In keeping with Sarah Franklin’s reading of in vitro fertilisation as a looking glass onto ourselves (2013), Ex Ovo Omnia invites the viewer to reflect on one’s own cellular origins and embodiments in new ways.

The title refers to the famous dictum of William Harvey (1578-1657), who first postulated that all animals are conceived from eggs. In Glover’s case, it refers to her experience of artist residencies in fertility clinics during which, she says, ‘the same thing happens [as] when you go through IVF treatment. You become obsessed with eggs. […]

I was seeing eggs everywhere’ (quoted in Franklin 2013, 285). Yet by replacing the eggs in the Petri dish with the fleshy flowers, the glass domes situate the microscopic gaze on our own cellular origins within a wider scope of reproductivities; they bring together IVF cycles with wider life cycles.

Resisting the popular framing of female fertility through a myopic focus on the scarcity of extractable eggs, Glover creates an expanded view of reproductive potentialities in the central glass dome, which displays a textual meditation on embodying eggs. In contrast to the increasing emphasis on failed fertility, and diminishing capacities to reproduce with age, eggs are re-imagined as abundant, and as valuable in their own right – full of luminous futurity.

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The floral and the textual domes produced by Glover

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and Lyon thus also redirect the focus away from IVF as a technology of fertility repair, inviting the viewer towards a broader reflection on the many forms of liveliness that are reproduced within our wider worlds.

DR LUCY VAN DE WIEL AND PROFESSOR SARAH FRANKLIN

CHEMICAL REPRODUCTION – H U M A N E M B RYO, 8 C E L L ( 2 0 1 7/ 1 8 ) , Cy a n o t y p e p r i n t m a d e from digital negative

Gina Glover SYMBOLIC REPRODUCTION

Science evolves through the application of experience, imagination, experimentation, innovative technology, and its community of enquirers. In so doing, scientific meaning grows, develops, and shifts its vocabularies,

Gina Glover co-founded London’s

insights and investigative methods. All

Photofusion Photography Centre in the

knowledge, including scientific knowledge,

1980s. She is the recipient of multiple

contains symbolic elements and, since it is

awards, including the Royal Photographic

formed in human culture, always expresses

Society’s Hood Medal, the Medical

an aesthetic element. Art too relies upon

Research Council’s Visions of Science

similarly human processes of imagination,

Award (twice), and research awards from

invention and technical development,

Arts Council England. In 2016 she became

including ways of seeing.

part of the Wellcome Foundation Award

The theme of reproduction, drawn from both science and art, anchors Gina Glover’s work in the apparently distinct themes of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and maize (corn) production, and through the playful elaboration of signifying forms and symbols within the visual aesthetic frame. As with the science of reproduction, her art aims to promote progress and the growth of shared meaning.

project, Life in Glass, led by Professor Sarah Franklin. Glover’s work ranges from these playful explorations of the biomedical sciences to long-term studies of anthropogenic landscapes, through to more psychological studies of environmental perception. www.ginaglover.com

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INSTRUMENTS O F LI F E (2017/18) inverted photograph

A desiccator (from the series Instruments of Life) used to culture embryos before gassed incubators were available. This device is similar to that used

by Edwards to cultivate Leslie Brown’s embryos, resulting in the birth of Louise Brown. The desiccator was filled with 5% of CO2 gas and placed in an incubator at 37°. The colour reflects Glover’s fascination with the notion of the ‘blueprint of life’.

Camilla Lyon These works have emerged from a process of observing the gardens at Murray Edwards whilst reflecting on my experience of undergoing IVF over the last three years.

The plant forms and geometry of the

Camilla Lyon has exhibited her painting,

space resonated with my sense of the

drawing and sculpture nationally and

often conflicting experiences of infertility

internationally including at Dulwich

treatment, of nature and artifice and the

Picture Gallery London, Room Gallery

desire to nurture life in a contrived context.

London, Nova Scotia College of Art and

Some of the paintings were made on site

Design Canada and the Irish Museum of

and include plant and architectural forms.

Modern Art Dublin. She has undertaken

They bring together images of growth and

residencies at The Garden Museum

life with abstract shape and give rise to

Lambeth, the Centre for the Urban and

the larger works which were made in the

Built Environment Manchester and Murray

studio. These works all have circular motifs

Edwards College, University of Cambridge.

which act as voids or presences and are monumental in scale. All the paintings are folded and mirrored images; they are the outcome of a process of reproduction and a creative act. The paintings reflect a process

Camilla studied MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and BA Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. She teaches Drawing and Fine Art at Camberwell College of Art,

of hope and grief and often the holding of

part of the University of the Arts London.

both; they belong to their time and place

www.camillalyon.com

and my experience.

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AU G U S T 2 01 7 (2017) carbon copy drawings with watercolour on paper

Sophie Seita Sophie Seita is an artist, writer, researcher, and translator. Her performances and lecture performances visualise, embody, or translate text via poetic dialogue, sculpture, costume, installation, and choreography. For this performance commission, Seita responds to the New Hall Art Collection, the concept and choreography of transposition, and the cross-pollinating possibilities of flowery metaphors and planting queer thinking and objects.

Her work has recently been presented at the Royal Academy (London), La MaMa

by Uljana Wolf (Belladonna*, 2017), and

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Galleria (NYC), and Cité Internationale

a Junior Research Fellow at Queens’

Sophie Seita

des Arts (Paris). She has received

College, Cambridge.

READING FO U N TA I N , A L EC T U R E P E R FO R M A N C E I N T WO PA RT S

fellowships and awards from Cambridge, Yale, Princeton, Buffalo, Columbia, NYU,

Committed to collaboration and hospitality,

and Studienstiftung des deutschen

she recently co-founded the performance

Volkes, among others. She’s the author

collective GORGONIA.

of Meat (Little Red Leaves, 2015) and Fantasias in Counting (BlazeVOX 2014), the editor of a facsimile edition of The Blind Man (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), the translator of Subsisters: Selected Poems

Sophie Seita will be performing at a Harvest Festival at Murray Edwards College in the Autumn. www. sophieseita.com

(2017) performed Royal Academy of Arts

New Hall Art Collection The New Hall Art Collection is a collection of modern and contemporary art by women at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. The Collection was founded in 1986 with the purchase of Mary Kelly’s sixpart work Extase, and has evolved ever since through gifts and loans from artists and alumnae. Today its works number over five hundred, from artists of international quality and renown including Maggi Hambling CBE and Judy Chicago. It is considered to be one of the largest and most significant collections of contemporary art by women in the world.

Reproductivities will encompass several spaces around Murray Edwards College, including the Dome, the walkways and the

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gardens. It will also feature some of the

Joanna Moss

works from the Collection itself, including

OW N CO PY

Joanna Moss’ painting Own Copy. www.art.newhall.cam.ac.uk

(1992) acrylic on canvas,

The Gardens A COLLEGE GARDEN The garden at Murray Edwards College is sustained by a propagation programme which means we grow up to 8000 plants a year. Nearly every plant you see was started The garden is tied into the rhythms of nurturing, culling and growing for each different kind of plant – annuals, biennials, tender perennials and shrubs. We collect thousands of seeds and cuttings for the following year.

Whether the plants are wild or cultivated,

PETER KIRKHAM (GARDENER)

in our six foot by two foot heated propagator.

many have stories associated with their

THE THREE SISTERS

introduction to the College garden. They

Beans, corn and squash are traditionally

may have been bought because they

grown together in Native American gardens to

are traditional, or novel. Perhaps they

create a polyculture of symbiotic plants. This

were given as a mark of friendship or in

ancient horticultural art also saves space and

exchange. Some represent gardeners’

replenishes the soil. In the College Garden,

acquisitiveness and others a thread of

the beans and squashes climb up Tipis to

interest. Some are subsequently given away.

allow visitors to walk among the plants.

FIESTA CORN In addition to showcasing the art of growing corn, the field has been planted to celebrate the American plant geneticist, Barbara McClintock (1902-1992). In 1983 McClintock received a Nobel Prize for her work on the chromosomes and genes of maize. The advantage of studying genes in maize is that each of the many kernels (seeds) on the cob is a separate individual. Among her many scientific discoveries and achievements is her description of the ‘jumping gene’ which is important in today’s genetic models of inherited colour, she demonstrated the effects of the jumping gene in the striped or spotted kernels. The variety ‘Fiesta’ is being grown in our cornfield because it has multicoloured kernels and can reach maturity in the very short British summer season.

PETER KIRKHAM (GARDENER)

transposition. When McClintock studied

MAIZE FIELD PROJECT In combination with the cell cultures explored in

another plant in order to create many types of new

Gina Glover’s art, and the reproductivity of the fold in

corn varieties with diverse uses – from animal feed to

Camilla Lyon’s painting, our exhibition explores the

biofuel (and popcorn!). Maize plants are consequently

theme of horticultural reproduction. Nowhere is this

some of the most culturally revered plants, celebrated

ancient artifice exemplified more vividly than in the

not only for their life-giving properties, but for their

cultivation of the maize – or corn – plant. Originally a

long and intimate reproductive partnership with

form of grass, modern maize cultivation is an art that

humans – a union reflected in the human-like size and

began as many as 10,000 years ago in what is now

shape of the plant.

Mexico. The bio-artisanal remaking of maize into a high yield cereal crop depended on the co-presence of both male and female reproductive systems on the same plant that could be manipulated by growers to derive endless different types of corn. At the top of the tall fibrous stalk is the hand-like seed-bearing tassle, which flowers in high summer and releases pollen which blows into the ‘ovuliferous inflorescences’ – or ears – tipped with hollow tubes, or silks. Each hollow silk leads to an individual ovule, or kernel, which together form the mature ear, or cob, of corn.

The unique reproductive and genetic qualities of maize have also made the plant an ideal model organism for scientific research. By remaking corn reproduction, for example, the American biologist Barbara McClintock was able to demonstrate that DNA is radically more flexible than previously assumed.

Her discovery of ‘transposition’, for which she received the Nobel Prize in 1983, proved that gene expression can be modified in response to environmental factors such as stress. McClintock’s discovery extended the ancient intimacy of humans with maize into the

Maize reproduction can be manipulated by ‘bagging’

very foundations of modern molecular biology, and

the tassle before it flowers, and thus collecting the

once again confirmed the exceptional reproductive

pollen, or seed, which can then be transferred to

capacity of this much celebrated plant.

AFTERWORD: TRANSPOSITION Reproductivities works both forward and back: into the insides of cells, and back out into the wider world; back in time and forward through the bioage; towards the potential for new creation but with an invitation to step aside and reflect on the origins of such endeavours. In addition to the themes of reproduction, artistry, biogenesis and crafted life, our project seeks to transpose the elementary components of creativity, including not only the content of creative endeavours but their forms, methods and contexts. As our society witnesses a transformative and new era of remaking reproduction, and the crafting of new life forms, we ask what resources we can draw upon to reflect upon this process.

For in addition to visual art and creative forms of artisanal production, our gardens remind us of the mutually creative processes that conjoin us with the living world. And where better than here, in a museum in a college in a garden, might we pause to think about how art can help us shape both the lives and the worlds we hope to be making for the future?

PROFESSOR SARAH FRANKLIN

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Wellcome Trust and British Academy Bourn Hall Clinic, with special thanks to Dr. Kay Elder, Nicola Graver and Adam Burnley Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge, with special thanks to Professor Ottoline Leyser, Dr. Devin O’Connor, Dr. Marco Catoni Chloe Thomas Jo Cobb and the Murray Edwards College gardening team Andrew West Dr. Geof Rayner Geraldine West Joanna Baruch Simon Parker Friends and family of Camilla Lyon, with special thanks to Carolyn McDonald

CREDITS Artists: Gina Glover, Camilla Lyon and Dr. Sophie Seita Curators (ReproSoc, Sociology, Cambridge): Professor Sarah Franklin, Dr. Lucy van de Wiel Curators (New Hall Art Collection): Harriet Loffler, Sarah Greaves, Eliza Gluckman Gardeners: Jo Cobb and the Murray Edwards College gardening team Communication: Clare Stroud Design: Georgia King Design Printing: Langham Press

MURRAY EDWARDS COLLEGE

ART COLLECTION

NEW HALL