Katy Macleod

This exhibition is very much about how work is produced, how an artist in a scientific laboratory conceives and makes art. It is a work-in-progress, a laboratory of sorts which reflects on a very particular scientific environment: the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge. This international laboratory is at the forefront of ground breaking research into genetics, and played a major role in the human genome project completed in 2004. It was here that Deborah Robinson extended her artist in residence work which started three years earlier with the Egenis research group at the University of Exeter. I talked to Deborah about her work in her studio at Egenis, where she talked freely about the whole process of working with scientists whose job it is to produce research in the important area of genomics. Genomics is the science which deals with genetic material, the DNA, genes, and chromosomes within a particular organism. The Egenis group's research is broadly within biological science, however it concentrates on the social implications of work which might, for instance, deal with GM crops, human ageing, or even human cloning. In fact, much of their work is directed at a fuller understanding of how to appropriately formulate what they find to ensure that their work has an effective and socially useful impact. In this context, it is a bewildering task for an artist to make work which retains its integrity as art.

 

>Deborah talked to me at length about her motivation to work in a research science environment and how she wanted to make work in the actual laboratories, the places where science knowledge is produced, (because it might have been assumed that she would work with scientific texts or data, for instance.) Here, scientists conduct endless and very detailed experiments in an environment which is solely geared to scientific inquiry, which must be conducted in an absolutely clean and scrupulously managed space, because samples must be uncontaminated and the data must be convincing if it is to further the research field. How then does an artist make any kind of contribution to this work? Like one of Deborah's key research sources, Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, she seeks what might have been overlooked, that question, as Conrad puts it, which no-one has thought to ask. Of course, this is madly ambitious but like so many wild endeavours from which we have learnt, it was conceived through a simple method of practice; she made small and unassuming pinhole cameras and placed them in the laboratory. In my view, this has been a brilliant strategy, because the pinhole camera, which is just a sealed cardboard box, only records through the light responsive photographic paper inside. It has no lens and only registers whatever the light creates on this paper. Also, because it does this through an exceptionally long exposure, 2.5 hours, in this case, it employs a kind of real time, perhaps the length of time a scientist might work without a tea break, for instance. However, although the pinhole work at Washington Singer laboratories at the University of Exeter records scientists' presence as they work, at the Sanger Institute, increasingly  laboratory tasks are undertaken by robots. For an artist whose work comes from an unalterably self conscious presence, the Sanger Institute environment offered an extreme condition of research, vast laboratories with minimal human engagement. In one's imagination these laboratories might represent the fertile ground for monsters to be born because that environment is completely alien to our everyday lives and experience. The places where we all work involve social interaction of some sort but if we think about Conrad's ideas again, it is our ordinary day-to-day labour which dulls our sense of time; by this he meant it dulls the complexity of what it is to fully understand being alive and the stark knowledge that, as organisms, we only die. Actually, it is this which The Heart of Darkness, confronts, the kind of insuperable muddle at the heart of living, which is a huge endeavour if we travel far out emotionally, psychologically and intellectually and also just a physical, day-to-day business of survival. We like to stave off too much thought to get on with the physical business of living and try to avoid travelling too far into deep questions about what life means, unlike the hero in The Heart of Darkness, Marlow; he journeys way out of nineteenth century Europe to encounter what he'd seen on maps in his childhood as 'blank spaces' in the world, such as Africa, an environment right outside his knowledge. The Sanger laboratories lie outside our familiar environments, also perhaps our concept of research. In this context, the one laboratory image that Deborah chose to discuss at length also registers a 'blankness' or emptiness, a large white space at its centre, at odds with the very efficient looking equipment all round the laboratory, where even light is a contaminant. This image seems to suggest that the laboratory might be a place where the unanticipated could take shape, where knowledge might somehow be withheld, an uncharted space, where as Deborah puts it, knowledge is in abeyance.

 

In this exhibition then what you will see is pinhole photographic evidence of science laboratory environments. In these places, Deborah Robinson has produced work which is about what such environments might hold beyond the production of science, perhaps a closer understanding of what it might feel like to be in an unknown space, perhaps a space where knowledge cannot be grasped because certain experience is so very difficult to put into words. This is particularly the case with making a painting, which is Deborah's main art practice, because on one level paint is just stuff 'a sludge' on a surface, while on another, it can be 'deeply alive, full of thought and expressive meaning' as James Elkins puts it in What Painting Is. In this exhibition of art research conducted in the Sanger Institute, you will see photographic images which may just register the stuff of a laboratory, what it is and what it includes, but you might also see other less predictable things such as the strange forms made by light as it takes up and casts aside the clear shapes of scientific equipment. For the scientists working alongside Deborah at Washington Singer laboratories, her work has made the familiar unfamiliar and that, it must be said, is the most socially effective role an artist has.