The mind is what the brain does. This is perhaps most clear when you consider the subtle and often striking changes in personality and mental ability associated with brain injury or pharmacological manipulation – physical changes to the structure or workings of an organ.
To look at the mind in physical form is an experience which can be disconcerting. It is at once grotesque and beautiful: as foreign as a creature from an ocean trench. We think of our selves as images of the body surface. Minds work with a similar currency trading signals through the shape of the face. A face can smile, laugh and sing and be loved. But faces are merely servants for their fragile masters. We are these creatures.
My project at this show, explant, is my second attempt to create art using tools and techniques from my own research. Design of this sculpture was influenced by the tools and techniques of electrode construction used to record the activity of brain cells.
