BREATH LAB exhibition

Tamara Baillie was the first artist, supported by the Women’s & Children’s Hospital Foundation, to respond creatively to the rich repository of artefacts and archives at the Hospital that is known as the History and Heritage Collection.

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Tamara’s dual identity as a medical professional and a visual artist made her the ideal fit for inaugural Artist in Residence for this Collection.   

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As Curator of the Collection, I found hosting Tamara rewarding on a personal-professional level. The roots of my own tertiary educational background are in science. Yet I had not consciously engaged with this aspect of my own history in perhaps two decades or more.
In our conversations around the scientific and medical objects, I found myself recalling
long-dormant knowledge.

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Unexpectedly, this sparked in me a desire to consider anew the empirical world. I was inspired to delve into Primo Levi’s masterpiece The Periodic Table, a collection of
essay-memoirs on science, in which he illuminates the beauty and creativity of this systematic enterprise; something that had earlier eluded me in my mindless application of scientific method.

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Down among the odds and ends of the History and Heritage Collection, Tamara and I shared moments of aesthetic-scientific banter. A robust piece of glassware was not merely a Liebig condenser. Passed between our hands, it had gravitas. Laboratory objects, arranged by Tamara on tables, took on personalities, each in possession of a habitus. Latin words, once learned through the rote memorisation of anatomical terminology, started to bubble up from my memory stores. The effect of interacting with artefacts of science, in the company of an artist, revealed to me a little of the art of science itself, and the capacity of art to help us make sense of its complexity.

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Primo Levi, in his essay titled ‘Hydrogen’, relates his initiation as a young man into the world of chemical experimentation in a rudimentary laboratory. He recalls being confused as to how to test out his ideas, on account that he did not know how to work with his hands. Insensitive and untrained, his hands “… were unfamiliar with the solemn, balanced weight
of the hammer, the concentrated power of a blade … the wise texture of wood …”. Confronted with the glass in the laboratory, he was enchanted by its mystery and forms, yet intimidated by its fragility.

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In her roles of medical practitioner and artist, Tamara operates as diagnostician and maker.

She is a master of problem solving, and of her hands.

 

Yet in the exhibition Breath Lab, the artist has virtually removed her hands from the art-making equation. She has taken sundry laboratory and medical apparatus from the Collection, felt their weights and textures with her sensitive, trained hands – manipulated them into atypical postures – and then ultimately chosen to work simply with the memories of them, as images.

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In doing so, she has created novel scientific scenarios. A length of concertinaed tubing is separated from its conventional apparatus; an old, portable gas analgesia machine used by midwives to give pain relief to mothers during home births. Twisted and turned upon itself, this piping is practically alive, and exponentially more dynamic. In connecting disparate pieces of equipment, the tube appears to test out hypotheses. To you, the visual-investigators, the tube inquires: is the artistic process not unlike the scientific process? Is the conversion of glass beaker to laminated image not some material transformation, of the kind Primo Levi fashioned when adding one element from the periodic table to another? Art and science are inseparable. In Breath Lab, on the wall, we observe their intertwining as literal.

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In the hollows of her vessels and tubes, Tamara invokes breath. In the Yellow Heart Gallery, set in a walkway connecting the maternal and children’s areas of the Hospital, these breath routes and receptacles signify power, and life. They remind that, on a nearby ward, a woman is absorbed in the laboured breathing of labour. With each painful contraction comes the sharp intake of breath. She inhales an analgesic substance through a tube. She harnesses her breath to channel her maternal power.

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She births a baby.

 

In this strange new world, the baby takes its first breath …