As we prepare to open our new gallery Being Human this week, we take a look back at the gallery it has replaced. Medicine Now opened in 2007 and allowed artists and audiences to explore the connections between contemporary medicine, life and art.
Medicine Now gallery, Steven Pocock. Source: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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Perhaps the most well-remembered exhibit in Medicine Now might be the mammoth set of volumes containing the human genome. Visitors could open the books and trace the code that makes us human. The books were a tribute to the Human Genome Project, partly funded by Wellcome, which published the first rough draft of human DNA in June 2000.
Medicine Now gallery, Steven Pocock. Source: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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Many works by artists in the gallery explored the implications of this sudden explosion of genetic knowledge. Andrea Duncan’s ‘Twenty Three Pairs’ (2002) reimagined the 23 pairs of human chromosomes as a drawerful of socks laid out for inspection, while Heidi Kerrison’s ‘Heidi X: The True Horror of Cloning’ (1998) asks what might happen to artistic originality if artists themselves could be cloned.
Medicine Now gallery, Steven Pocock. Source: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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As contemporary medicine has entered the territory of microbiology and the barely visible, or even invisible, some artists chose to explore what can and can’t be seen with the eye. Alexa Wright’s ‘After Image’ (1997) makes visible a ‘phantom’ amputated limb whose owner still experiences sensation in it, despite its apparent absence.
Medicine Now gallery, Steven Pocock. Source: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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Colour-blind artist Luke Jerram’s ‘Swine Flu’ (2009) sculpture also removes something: the vivid artificial colours often seen in graphic medical images of viruses. Instead, we can see the delicate structures that form both the inside and the outside of the viral package. Jerram was inspired by his own experience of having swine flu during the 2009 pandemic. Behind it, Pat York’s ‘Neural Nexus’ (2001) explores the unseen inner structures of the human body.
Medicine Now gallery, Steven Pocock. Source: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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Not everything in Medicine Man was comfortable. John Isaacs’ sculpture ‘I Can't Help the Way I Feel’ (2003) presents a hyperrealistic vision of human skin and fat, complete with swollen legs, veins and sores. Isaacs thinks of this work as being part of the “emotional landscape” of the individual, but fat activist Charlotte Cooper described it like this: “a universalised fat body is rendered as a diseased, pitiful, sexless, grotesque blob on legs. I think the title is stupid and affected so I call it The Blob.”
Body Image study day in the Medicine Now gallery, Steven Pocock. Source: Wellcome Collection. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).
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Many of the objects in Medicine Now have been acquired and will be preserved by Wellcome Collection. But Medicine Now was about much more than the objects. It also played host to thousands of tours, special events, discussions, lates and study groups. The students pictured here are taking part in a study day considering body image in contemporary society and different cultures. All this and more will still be happening in our new Being Human gallery. Come for a visit and find out what it means to be human in 2019.