2019
Museum and Galleries
Sydney College of the Arts Gallery, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
The solo exhibition Cast a cold eye on life, on death: The Remake: Medicalised Death in ICU, was shown in three of the gallery spaces at the Kirkbride campus of the SCA Gallery, University of Sydney, Australia from the 10-18th May 2019
The exhibition consisted of nine major works installed as a sequence activated by a performative lecture. Images and videos of the lecture and of elements of the works can be seen by following the link on the image to the left.
The works were
Medical Monitor Work, 2017 video 7’23”.
Racing Patience ICU 2018, canvas, paint, found objects and printed matter, dimensions variable
Blood on Silk: Last Seen (partial) 2017, reconfigured 2019 metal, paint, vinyl print and found objects, dimensions variable
Blood on Silk: Price Taker Price Maker 2015 reconfigured 2019 Sound, printed materials and found objects, dimensions variable
Blood on Silk: Last Seen (partial) 2017, reconfigured 2019, silk paper, dimensions variable.
Blood on Silk: Blood Farming/The Producers, 2018, plastic, metal, paint, ink, projection and found objects, 135 x 78 x 96(h)cm
Blood on Silk: Bleeding Out, 2016, metal, glass, paint, ink, projection and found objects, 135 x 78 x 96(h)cm.
Blood on Silk: Buy/Sell, 2017, metal, glass, paint, ink, projection and found objects,135 x 78 x 96(h)cm.
Blood on Silk: Magenta No Exit, 2017, canvas, paint wood and satin ribbon, 285 x 285 (h)cm
Together all nine works are the result of practice-led research into medicalised death in ICU. This can also be described as how a patient dies in ICU when that death has become a medical problem i.e. become medicalised.
photo credit Alex Gooding
The State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia
The solo site-specific exhibition Woven Architecture in sites 1 and 2 was developed on site and then exhibited at The State Silk Museum in Tbilisi, Georgia initially from July 1st to 29th 2019 then the exhibition was extended until Oct 2019.
Woven Architecture is a site specific weaving in two sites within the State Silk Museum. The weaving is made of ribbon and is made of and on the architecture of the site. In this work, the I responded to the institutional interiors of the State Silk Museum in Tbilisi by the making of a site-specific weaving using satin ribbon in shades of off white and black. The structure of the weaving will be made solid by the architecture and the tension or stability of the weave will be the stability and tension of the architectural elements.
By using ribbon, the weaving process can be off loom. The architecture is the structure holding the fabric. The satin ribbon coloured black, white and off white is woven into variations of the sateen weave. Both the satin weave as ribbon and the sateen weave as architecture have long floating lengths which are highly reflective, shiny or luxurious. The woven surfaces perform as if they are a photonic device embedded in the architecture. As the viewer changes their angle of viewing, the conditions such as time of day and type of lighting the work appears to change colour and tone.
Both the satin and the sateen weaves when they are notated as weaving patterns can be likened to forms of data visualisation where the data consists of determining the classic 0 or 1 of computer programming by showing whether each thread is behind or in front of the other at any point in the fabric. When these forms of data visualisation are overlaid with another form of visualisation through the high contrast colours of black, white and off white, discrepancies, errors and the unexpected become evident. The data is remade by the mode of its visualisation. In this work the sateen weave is overlaid with a weave pattern tracing the marks on a bedside medical monitor showing the changes in the heartbeat, oxygenation and blood pressure of a patient whose abdominal aortic aneurysm has ruptured and they are bleeding out internally to death.
Photo credit Alex Gooding
Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, Katoomba Australia
A group exhibition titled Resilience in the times of adversity, Contemporary responses to WWII, was devised and curated by Vivienne Dadour for the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, Katoomba, NSW, Australia. Vivienne selected the work Coughing up Blood for this exhibition. Follow the link on the image on the left to find out more.
During most of World War II tuberculosis was treated by isolation, rest, nutrition and clean air. Sanatoriums to provide treatment including isolation had been established in the Blue Mountains for many years and infected soldiers were often treated here.
Coughing up Blood is concerned with an individual patient infected with tuberculosis, not the statistics on the total number of deaths or the frequency of infection, nor on the public health programmes designed to reduce the numbers of infected. This work focuses on the sick returned soldier, alone, frightened and uneasy. It is the landscape of the liminal space of the patient in isolation, both physically and emotionally. They exist between the well, well enough and the dead, the soldier and the civilian, those “over there” in immediate danger and those in limbo at home.
This is not a visually complicated work. The elements are stripped back to the minimum. You can see the hospital curtain, the inner isolation room, the empty bed and the back-lit image of the infected lungs. The beautiful but ineffective hospital curtain is made of silk paper hanging high above our heads unable to provide what is expected. It can’t be washed. It doesn’t give the patient any privacy, sight, sound or smell. Bad news given to the patient behind the curtain can be overheard by others on the ward. The bed is empty the patient is elsewhere. Their absence if felt with unease by the visitor. They may have died. There isn’t a new patient in the bed yet. It must have only just happened.
The other artists in this exhibition were Vivienne Dadour, Anne Graham, Chris Tobin, and Sean O’Keeffe. Vivienne Dadour also curated the exhibition. Photo credit Patricia Kleemann
Performance
Sydney College of the Arts Gallery, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
A series of performative lectures were undertaken in the exhibition Cast a cold eye in life, in death: The Remake: Medicalised death in ICU. Click on the link on the image to watch a seven minute video of stage one of this performative lecture.
This video is of the first stage in the lecture. It starts with an oral history given by an ICU nurses about one patient and her death. This oral history is quoted from 'David Crippen, End-of-Life Communication in the ICU: A Global Perspective (New York: Springer, 2008): 52.' Then I sit behind the audience to tell a fairy tale while they watch the simulation on the bedside medical monitor of a patient rupturing an abdominal aneurysm and bleeding out to death.
The quote from an ICU nurse is:
Each day I would come in praying that I would not see her name on the whiteboard with my name next to it. And each day both were there. She moved from near death crisis to near death crisis with her vitals often hovering at levels that we all knew were not survivable - yet she survived. Analgesia was difficult due to hemodynamic instability. Her liver failed, she developed an irreversibly metabolic acidosis, and renal replacement therapy became unavailable as her cardiac output fell. Mottled and bleeding she slowly dies. She was almost at the end, a nurse summoned to her bed in the night by an alarm. Her death had taken 2 months and 4 days.[1]
[1]David Crippen, End-of-Life Communication in the ICU: A Global Perspective (New York: Springer, 2008): 52.
Stage two was to play the card game Racing Patience ICU, a rough, fast game of life and death. In stage three the group moved to the apparently empty exterior space around a hospital where the audience either smoked or just passed time. Stage four thrust the audience back into the economic drivers of human farming and sale by auction of blood and blood products. This theme continued into stage five where human farming became more closely aligned with our expectations of agriculture, of farming animals for meat and milk with the final stage being adjacent to the No Exit work where choice is limited indeed non existent as all doors are closed.
Warning: This video and the performative lecture contain images, sounds and activities that deal with death, dying, hospitals, violence, blood and body parts for transplantation.
Groundswell Conference, Leura Australia
Racing Patience ICU, the card game, was selected to be played at the Groundswell conference on death and dying at the Fairmont Resort in the Blue Mountains.
A focus of the conference held by Groundswell was arts and health or arts and death. Click on the image to watch two videos. The first is of a conference participant accessing their experience playing the card game and how it relates to their area of research which is developing empathy for disadvantaged people in times of a health crisis The other video is of the playing of the game Racing Patience ICU at an earlier event .
The mission statement for the Groundswell project is for the organisation to ‘work with individuals, organisations and communities to improve how people in Australia die, care and grieve.’ This project Racing Patience ICU inhabits the transdisciplinary sites between science, technology and the arts. In this card game, the patient is comatose and has no agency, no ability to physically instruct the ICU team about their wishes. The characteristics of the end of life within an ICU are often driven by technology, and determined by what it is possible to attempt, not necessarily what is in the better interests of the patient. The process of dying is on occasion reported as excessively prolonged, painful and stressful for patients, families and medical staff. The ethics of the decisions made in this process can be questioned.
An individual can alleviate the uncertainty arising from a potential future lack of agency by using a legal document such as an Advanced Care Directive which outline the boundaries of what medical treatments are to be used in what situations. The laws covering these legal instruments vary from country to country and it can be difficult to know if the patient has completed such a document if they are unattended and comatose. There is no central registry that can be checked to determine if such a directive exists or not. In addition, many patients present having not completed an advanced care directive or its equivalent.
Screenings
Golden Age Cinema, Sydney, Australia
This suite of three short fairy tales was screened at the Golden Age Cinema, Sydney Australia under the title Once upon a time long ago, and far away x 3. Click on the image to the left to watch the three videos. Imagine you have popcorn and can’t leave until the end.
This was my first screening of video works within the cinema context. The narrative of the fairy tales with a beginning, middle and end was not so workable in the gallery context where the audience tends to come and go. The cinema context focuses on the idea that there is a beginning and end to the work.
The script of the first fairy tale - Once upon a time long ago and far away: Being moved from one place to another.
Chapter One:
We can see a patient lying on a trolley in a recovery bay. The patient has come back from surgery. We can see that they are asleep. One eye blinks. The patient can see fuzzy, ill-defined and unfamiliar shapes. We can also see these shapes around them. The patient is half awake. They are unable to move. Death appears and challenges them to a cooking competition. The patient is scared.
Chapter two:
The patient is being moved from one place to another. They are on a trolley. Flick, flick, blink flick flick, blink. The patient is alone in the corridor. Death appears and counts down from three to one, starting the competition. Death is cooking a sponge cake with a middle layer of strawberries and whipped cream. The patient pushes Death away. Death falls off the trolley onto the floor and spills the cake mixture. It forms a lake on the floor that looks like the map of Greenland.
Chapter Three
The patient is alone in a room. They decide to make a lemon delicious pudding.
The end.
Writing
Cast a Cold Eye on Life on Death: The Remake: Medicalised Death on ICU.
Fiona Davies completed a practice led PhD during 2019. Her thesis can be viewed/downloaded from the University of Sydney Library website at
https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/21232
Cast a Cold Eye on Life, On Death is a quote from W.B.Yeats
Community
2nd Worldwide Studio and Apartment Biennale
The performance of building a house of cards with the non standard cards of the game Racing Patience ICU
This work Building a Hours of Cards was one of the performative private provocations that formed part of the program put together by the artist collective MAPBM for the 2nd WASB titled ‘We respect your privacy.’
From the WASB website - In the times of the utmost digital intruding in personal life, we are constantly reminded of validation of our privacy in continuous pop-up screens of web-pages and endless sign-in forms. And aren’t those conditions are entirely neglected by predictive typing, content suggestions and “things you might also like”? How much do you anticipate the invasion in your personal life when creating massive social network presence? Didn’t you tape off your laptop camera? Don’t you get advert recommendations about something, you’ve merely spoken in the presence of your phone?
However, the Biennale topic is more comprehensive than concerns regarding digital interference and “15 minutes of fame”. Following the subject of the 1st WASBiennale – Be My Guest, the theme WE RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY? repeatedly addressing the current socio-political situation in the world, as well as artistic representation in the circumstances of recession.
Is it really possible nowadays to stay quiet and “nonresistant to evil”, do not make a choice, do not participate in some way? Is the position of the spectator a way of independence, or is it masks neglection? And would it be ethical to encourage someone to be committed, or it will be disrespectful to their privacy?