Christine Borland: Cast From Nature

Borland's most recent project began when she discovered a fibreglass sculpture in the collection of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. The sculpture records the dissection of an unidentified man who had been posed with his back arched in a manner resembling Michelangelo’s Pieta (1498–1499). Over the last nine months Borland has set up a ‘live’ studio so people could witness her transformative process of recasting the figure. Freed from his plinth and newly cast and restored, the anonymous man and is displayed in a manner more akin to the original pose of the Pieta. This poetic transformation is at the heart of Borland’s work in which the certainty of science is put into question by the ambiguity of art.

‘I want people to be thinking back to the dissection process, which was the starting point here. In doing something hands on I’m inserting myself in an active role. There's always an assumption that what I’m doing is a simple critique. But I'm not just saying look, this poor guy was anatomised, posed, cast, made into a sculpture... it's making me complicit, adding complexity to the whole story.’ Christine Borland