Claude Heath

Sara Barnes, ‘Ecologies of Anatomy: commissioned work for Anatomy Acts.’ In ‘Anatomy Acts: How We Come to Know Ourselves’, edited by Andrew Patrizio and Dawn Kemp, published by Berlinn, 2005.

It was… The Edinburgh Stereoscopic Atlas of Anatomy (1906)andThe Anatomy of the Human Eye (1912) that Claude Heath investigated in his anatomical research for Anatomy Acts (1). Heath is no stranger to the complexities of visual and tactile perception. In his blindfolded drawings he feels an object with one hand while drawing with the other, marking out his tactile experience by disrupting the accepted order of hand eye co-ordination we associate with mark-making. The finished images are revealed as tangled skeins of colour or layered paths of tiny dots with a remarkable sense of cohesion and consolidation about them. More recent enquiries involve drawing in three dimensions with the aid of aerial photographs and computer software to create landscapes of Ben Nevis and revolving animated maps and paintings of the constellations - each delving into the route patterns of existing phenomena and how we perceive them.

Engaging with the innovative research project ‘Anarkik3d’ (formerly ‘Tacitus’ and ‘Hands On’) at Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh University’s School of Informatics, Heath has utilised 3D computer software in his digital drawings based on the stereographic pictures of the human eye and the thorax. With the use of stereo glasses and a haptic feedback device that the user manipulates in space and which provides a sensation of touching the surfaces of lines and objects being created on screen, he draws freehand in a 3D interface. The haptic feedback involves exerting pressure on the end point (stylus) of the tool to gain tactile sensation and the stereo vision is achieved by the use of the glasses and a built in mirror in the display panel – a high-tech version of the original stereographs which afford the user with a floating digital 3D image which can be rotated in space. The user thus not only sees the 3D object, but feels it and can manipulate the objects and lines to create a variety of surfaces – feeling soft and spongy, for example, or hard and taut. The artist’s network of nerves transmitting information and functioning somewhere between touching and seeing, conceiving and cognition, is thus heightened by its woven connection with the electronic network of the system software. The Edinburgh project is aimed at designers, artists and animators, but with these fast developing capabilities, haptic systems are being researched and trialed as aids to learning anatomy and training in medical procedures.

‘See – at the human core
lies not the heart

but a forked stick

  • a divergence

    • we illustrate well’

    (2)

    The original stereoscopic images of the eye and the thorax are seen in isolation, distanced from their organic context -their bodily home - and viewed in a disembodied, abstract form. Yet the sepia images are startling as a reminder of the human body as organic in comparison to today’s visual objectification of the body and its parts as transformable, transfigured, transferable, transgenic. Here, the eye’s smooth, shiny globe lens with its reflection – a window in the sunlight? a face peering through a camera lens? – appears to pulsate with a primeval urge to either pop out from its flimsy filigree nest or else sink softly into its further depths, its tendrils ready to close protectively in. In Heath’s 3D drawing the doubling of the eye bristles with the intricate fragility of Borland’s gossamer spider webs and the bullet holes with their cracked, spindly spurs. From two small circular solids, Heath’s depictions of the eyes radiate from the centre into a silky blackness.

    The Thomson stereographic eye appears luscious, but it is a hollowed out seemingly woody scene that the Edinburgh Atlas’ stereograph of the thorax presents to us. The vital organs of the heart and lungs have been removed so that a framed cavity of intricate topography fills the pictorial space. What seem like withered stalks and staunch trunks are of course clipped ribs, veins and arteries with an overarching canopy of membranes, muscle and skin. The numbered pointers correlate with an anatomical index and remind us of the educational context of the stereographic picture, but the viewer is still drawn in to a place of dark imaginings: robbed of the heart and bellows, the ground also seems to cave in, leading down to as yet unplumbed depths. Heath’s sequential studies of the thorax progressively fill the negative spaces with the digitally created lines tracing the movements of his drawing hand. Reinstating drawing into the stereoscopic repertoire as originally created by Charles Wheatstone just prior to the invention of photography, the 3D objects (rather than simple lines on a 2D surface) create their own shadows lending them a greater depth and sensuality. These looping and sinuous strokes have a sumptious ribbon-like quality about them, their elegant weaving through inky space resemble highly stylised corsets – a kind of body bondage which can be read as soothingly protective or threatening in its restrictive zeal. Yet these velveteen, slinky straps have failed to restrain what Heath refers to as ‘the little bounder’. ‘-Oh yes, the heart itself’ – the heart of the matter, removed from the scene.

     

    Heath’s network of snaking marks cosset, entwine and penetrate a central unrealised core, but do not yoke themselves to it. As with [Christine] Borland, [Joel] Fisher and [Kathleen] Jamie, the works continue in a meandering, open-ended and evolving ecology. This is not only in the material life of the work itself –Fisher’s beard growth, Borland’s trees – but in art’s ecological networks, its connections, meanings, sensations, interpretations and transformations. It is a flow of art that distinguishes it from a simple tracing, and permits the penetration of the tree from multiple entry points and, therefore, multiple exit points or lines of flight – leaking, rupturing, re-emerging, re-connecting (3). Anatomical knowledge is not imperviously sealed, but entails and invites rigorous and novel assaults on its hierarchical structures, roots and branches. Anatomical display supports it with a precarious binding of its ecology. But it is the rhizomic mapping of art’s imagination that not only penetrates the tree, but also offers a line of escape.

     

    References and Further Reading

    (1). Thomson, A.1912. The Anatomy of the Human Eye. Oxford: Clarendon.

    Waterson, D. (ed.). 1906. The Edinburgh Stereoscopic Atlas of Anatomy. London.

    Holmes, Oliver.Wendell. 1859. ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’ in Goldberg, V.Photography in Print.1981. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

    (2) Jamie, K. 2004. The Tree House. London: Picador.

    Jamie, K. 2005. Findings. London: Sort of Books.

    (3). Deleuze, G.and Guattari, F.1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Massumi, B. London: Athlone Press. From the original, 1987. Mille Plateaux Vol. 2 of Capitalisme et schizophrenie. Minneaplois: University of Minnesota Press.

     

     

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