Selected by Siobhan Wall

Vivien Blackett is a painter who often uses drawings as background research for her vivid but thoughtful diptychs and triptychs. During the last few years she has been making meticulous images sourced from 15th and 16th century woodcuts, including labouring farmers, leafy trees from botanical guides and other aspects of rural life. By combining small-scale figurative drawings with recent scientific images derived from microscopic specimens, she juxtaposes evidence of contemporary medicine with a pre-scientific episteme. In doing so the anonymous characters she depicts seem vulnerable and innocent, trapped in a God-fearing world where contemporary medical accounts would seem as far-fetched as tales of alchemical transformation. In particular her tender drawings of women in wimples and long gowns have an added poignancy when considering the widespread ignorance of gynaecological knowledge at the time the original prints were made. Although these traces of a pre-industrial landscape seem ingenuous, the visual collision of 21st century medical knowledge with pre-industrial illustrations invites a comparative account across centuries; temporal distances are imaginatively shrunk as well as the images of tiny figures next to Blackett's depictions of enlarged cellular structures.

Unlike many contemporary drawings which seem removed from the exigencies of modern life, her work invites a reflexive understanding of how the subject is imbricated within the scientific paradigms of the era in which they happen to live.

Siobhan Wall is an independent curator currently living and working in Amsterdam.

Curator profile

More information on Vivien Blackett

August 2008