Ruth Hutchinson’s latest laboratory experiment is part alchemical cauldron, part Dr Moreau and Dr Frankenstein, and part Seth Brundle. It is science fiction meeting Gray’s Anatomy via the surrealistic penchant for the exquisite corpse.
Executed with exquisite skill and grace, Hutchinson’s cabinet of curiosities is presented as a tightly curated museum-style installation of reliquaries and vitrines containing or surrounded by voodoo-charms, text-book style illustrations and mysterious glass vessels, all haunted by the ghosts of Georges Bataille and Luis Buñuel’s classic Un Chien Andalou (1929). For it is the human eye that is Hutchinson’s recurring motif, disembodied, dissected and all too often desecrated.
In M(eye)ND Hutchinson seems to be on a mission to ‘remake’ the history of human anatomy, formulating a reconsideration of an anatomical museum. There are literal references to medical history; in Trephination tool (to create an escape hatch) (2014) she makes use of the archaic medical procedure, trephination, in which a hole was drilled into the human skull to allow malignant spirits trapped within to escape. However in Trephination tool (rescue attempts) (2014) she takes this macabre procedure further. In thirteen exquisite small drawings we can see these spirits—abstracted, perhaps malevolent, little creatures that could be spermatozoa, fingers, cells or pure ectoplasm squirming for release.
The scientist in Hutchinson relies largely on peculiar mechanics for her bodily investigations—heady tools constructed from timber and silk, brass and wax. Materiality is central to Hutchinson’s practice, yet almost inevitably in unexpected ways. Eye Control (2014) hangs from the ceiling, at first appearance an unwieldy abstract sculpture. But closer inspection reveals a device for boring into the retina. Meanwhile The Revolution of the Brainstem (2012) presents a mechanical, clock-like device tracking the