Photo: Sotha Bourn. © Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Transcript
Helen explores our senses, playing on the edges of science and art. Her work evokes a sense of revulsion but at the same time is incredibly fascinating. She's knitted an exact scale replica (and when I say exact, it is very precisely measured) of the female organs – urinary tract and uterus. Her choice of concept and materials varies dramatically from one work to the other but the uneasiness she brings to the viewer is constant. From a scientific background, she obviously knows the revulsion that it causes but it doesn't seem to bother her in working with human hair – in fact she shows complete mastery of this material. Pynor works with ultimate respect for these fine fibres. Recent work is a study of people who have drowned in the River Thames, and she's created some extraordinary images on glass from these statistics.
Untitled (uterus urinary)
Helen Pynor
Dimensions
290 x 360 X 200
Materials
knitted human hair
Artist statement
‘In my work I explore the complex dialogues between biological and cultural processes. I’m interested in the registration and transmission of personal and cultural experience in the biological body, and importantly, in the active collaboration and participation of the biological in this process at cellular and physiological levels.
In my hair works I’ve knitted together single strands of human hair to form large and small-scale sculptures. These strands were grown by women in a distant country and are now twisted into complex forms by me, entangling bodies, time, memory and place.
The visceral nature of the works and the repetitive labour required to make them suggest to me the efforts and endurances of everyday living. However seen from a distance the works become transparent and ghost-like, entering other in-between spaces of past and present, flesh and memory, beauty and repulsion, living and dead.’