One person Exhibition

This exhibition related to an individual experience of metastasised bowel cancer and the visceral social and emotional responses to such a condition. Funding from the Wellcome Trust was awarded for the research and to make new work, with Eric Clark (consultant surgeon) as scientific advisor. Initially based on collective research, (with Alistair Skinner) the final works were presented by Meynell alone.
A recurrent theme of the exhibition was that of copying, reproduction and breakdown of reproduction (cell mutation), i.e. order and disorder. For example, the formation of a tumour was represented by performance artist Gary Stevens replicating himself with increasingly ridiculous dress and demeanour, across a bank of video screens. Cross-disciplinary imaging techniques producing different meanings were the motivation for watercolours made of biopsy material employing methodologies common to both science and art. Schematic diagrams referencing both fields mapped instructions for the insertion of a Hickman line (permanent intravenous catheter for chemotherapy) in a format visually evoking ‘pop art'. These images were then etched into slate. A facsimile of a Hickman Line was cast in metal and sutured into a gallery wall, a metaphor for the body's invasion by a foreign object.
Funded by a Wellcome Trust Science on Screen and Stage Award £44,000
The research was conducted and presented over several years in different phases. Meynell's preliminary results were presented by Dr Andrea Phillips (Goldsmiths College) at the ‘Sci-Art' symposium, Liverpool Biennial, 2002.
Meynell, Skinner and Clark contributed research explored by this project to ‘Science Art & the Personal' edited by Bergit Ahrends, published by The Wellcome Trust, London, 2004.