Art
When
AND SCIENCE MEET
By Melissa Walsh
F
or Catherine Truman, art is a combination of her creativity and what she sees through the microscope. The South Australian artist and jeweller is presenting an intriguing show of objects, installations, images and film including several brand new works spanning the 20 years of her research at the nexus of art and science. The exhibition, No Surface Holds, is showing at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery from September 21.
Her work is renowned for its diversity and incorporates contemporary jewellery, objects, digital image and film installation with a focus upon the parallels between artistic process and scientific method. Investigating Truman’s twenty years of collaborative practice at the nexus of art and science, this exhibition will be an important retrospective of the multiple engagements Truman has had working with scientists over this time as well as featuring a new body of work.
E ssence
50 | PENINSULA
September 2018
An accomplished artist, Truman has a love of research flowing in the undercurrent to all of her practice; a practice that is of and about the body as much as it is intended for it. “The interior of the body is a concealed territory – the less we see the more we imagine,” said Truman. “I’m interested in how we reveal and conceal the unfamiliar, the unaccustomed, and the invisible.” The artist explains she has a curiosity of the very nature of the human body which has always been a potent resource for her work and choice of medium. “My current interests lie in the ways in which the human anatomy has been translated through artistic processes and scientific method – how the experience of living inside a body has been given meaning,” she said. With a diverse practice that explores the parallels between art and science, Truman is renowned for her meticulous carving skills, and in 1990 she was awarded the Japan/South Australia