DR HELEN PYNOR
Dr Helen Pynor is an artist and researcher whose creative practice grew from a framework of empirical scientific enquiry. She explores philosophically ambiguous zones, such as the life-death boundary and the animate-inanimate boundary in relation to prosthetics designed for the human body. In 2019, the artist’s hip replacement surgery further spurred the interest in relationships between organic and synthetic materials. Employing photography, film, sculpture, and new media as tools to express themes of liminality, time, and symbiosis, she conducts scientific experiments to illuminate the nature of experience and philosophical realms that the sciences typically preclude.
Dr Pynor often collaborates with researchers and participates in residencies within scientific and clinical institutions, and currently has work in Renaissance 3.0: A Base Camp for New Alliances of Art and Science in the 21st Century at ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, and Des Cheveux et des Poils at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.
Kate Mothes: I’m fascinated by your background in science. Did you move into art over time, or was art always something that was in tandem with how you were approaching the sciences?
Dr Helen Pynor: I started completely focused on science. I had wanted to be a biologist from quite a young age, and I grew up in a really bushy Sydney suburb with tracts of bush around and spent a lot of time in the bush. I was really kind of obsessed by nature and creatures and insects and those kinds of things, so I did an Honors degree in cell and molecular biology. I was on the track to a PhD, the next logical step—my peers all did that as the next step—and I just stepped aside.
It was really during my Honors year that I was starting to become more interested in art and I don't even know how that segue happened. I had a partner at the time who was really into art photography, and that was an important influence. I just sat back and took some time out, did some traveling and some work in science part-time as an income. And you know, I think that it reinforced for me that I still loved what science studies, but the methodologies of science, the practice of being a scientist, the very reductionist way of seeing the world that scientists need to have to do empirical work… There are many great scientists who also have a hugely holistic view, too, but the day-to-day practice of science is generally very reductionist by necessity, as scientific knowledge is built incrementally in this way.
Within a few years of graduating from science, I was full-time at art school, training to be an artist, but it took quite a long period of time before I formally brought art and science together. When I did my PhD in the 2000s—I don't know if you're familiar with this philosophical strain of thought that's around at the moment called New Materialism. It's something that's come partly out of a feminist scholarship, partly out of some other cultural theory domains, and it was developing a conceptual language to understand the biological as a creative force in its own right that, like culture, also has an authorial voice, a creative voice, and has agency.
It was that body of scholarship that I was able to tap into in my PhD. I started to collaborate formally with scientists and do in-depth projects with scientists to build a language as an artist that drew on science—that needed scientific methodologies—but was not making scientific knowledge. It was making artistic knowledge and more philosophically-based knowledge.
Collaboration with Peta Clancy, The Body is a Big Place, 2013. Installation: heart perfusion device, live heart perfusion performance, 3-channel video projection, single channel video on monitor, and sound. Exhibited at Galerija Kapelica, Ljubljana. Photo: Miha Fras. Image courtesy of the artists. Watch on Vimeo.
Do you feel like you were drawn to a level of subjectivity, as opposed to the scientific observational or objective side, or drawn to the idea of multiple explanations for things in a different sort of container, in a sense?
That's definitely part of it. And to be able to slough off those constraints that exist in science where you really have to stay within narrow bounds of thought in terms of your outputs. But it was more than that. There are philosophers of science, who think very broadly and critically about how scientific knowledge is built, its biases and so forth. But empirical scientists, who are building knowledge incrementally, have less space to think at this more meta philosophical level. Whereas as an artist, I feel incredibly lucky that we can bring all of the layers in, including the empirical. I do actually do scientific experiments in my practice.
I was going to ask you about that, actually!
It matters to me that they're done rigorously. Not to the level of publishing in a journal because I don't need to do that. But I do them in a real way so I'm not working in a science-fiction kind of way where I dream up possible scenarios and express them in the work. I'm often doing an actual grounded experiment and testing whether the phenomenon of interest is a real thing or not. And then I bring in that evidence, if you want to call it that, into the artwork.
I’m often working in liminal zones. For example, a thread that I followed for quite a period of time was the ambiguity of the life-death boundary. I would do these detailed, tiny case studies that were empirically based, but they have this broader backdrop of a philosophical question behind them. It's working at those scales that interests me as an artist that you can't really do as freely as a scientist.
Habitation, 2021. Unglazed bone china (made from the artist's bone removed during surgery, supplemented by animal bone), unglazed earthenware, felt, coral, metal, acrylic, archival pigment prints, and lightboxes. Dimensions variable. Photo: Helen Pynor. Image courtesy of the artist, Experimenta, and City of Joondalup Art Collection. An Experimenta Commission, Capacity has been supported by City of Joondalup, Western Australia
Have you run into any roadblocks in terms of how you're able to use or incorporate biological specimens? Or do you find that it's actually more freeing, in a sense, to be able to use or interpret things through an artistic lens as opposed to a scientific lens?
I do have a sort of internalized code of ethics that I bring to using living materials. I use living cells, living tissues, very occasionally whole entities, like those little chick embryos I used in the series ‘Fallen’. Very early on in developing my art-science practice, I did a residency at SymbioticA in Perth, Western Australia, which is one of the pioneers internationally of art-science practice. They have a lot of experience around what sort of ethical structures artists need in order to engage with living material in their practices. So I received great training from them, and that's pretty much carried through all of my practice.
Whenever I'm dealing with something that will be alive or is alive at one point during the art-making, I think about what my ethical bottom line is and what I am or am not comfortable with. With the chick embryos, I did think hard about that because they were one of the more confronting creatures to work with. It's one thing to work with cells in a culture, or an organ, but it's another thing to work with a full being.
In the end I decided to work below the threshold where scientific ethics approval is required if scientists are using chicken embryos. There's a certain stage of development in the chicken embryo’s life where scientists working in a university or a medical institution can work with them, without needing to gain ethics approval. I thought, okay, I'll use that as my guideline. But I have to say I was still troubled by the experience, when it came to actually working with them and literally having to break the little eggs open. They were euthanized before I worked with them, by putting them in the cold overnight, the night before we worked with them, which is supposed to be gentler because they get drowsy and fall asleep in the cold. But I did feel a lot of grief. It was a two-day photography shoot. I remember going home after day one and just howling.
In other cases, Peta Clancy, a collaborator, and I worked with pig hearts that had to be fresh enough to still be capable of beating, so we thought about where to source them from. The way that we could do this was within the food industry where the pigs would be killed anyway for food production. We had a very complicated negotiation with each of the abattoirs we worked with because we had to be on the shop floor of the abattoir where the pigs were being killed, to get the hearts fast enough. It was hardcore confronting for us, but we could live with the fact that this was a byproduct of meat production and the animal wasn't being killed on our behalf.
Fallen 12 (left; detail) and Fallen 14 (right; detail), both 2017. Archival pigment print, face-mounted on glass, 129 x 30 centimeters, editions of 5 + 1 AP. Images courtesy of the artist and Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney. Scientific ethics guidelines were observed in the handling of chicken embryos used in ‘Fallen’. Developed at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden
Do you find that relationship between emotions and objectivity has been challenging or surprising, or have you been taken aback by your response to making the work or how it was received by other people once it was exhibited?
In terms of how it's perceived by others, sometimes I haven't been sure how gallery visitors might respond. So far, I've never attracted a negative response from audiences, although it doesn't mean I won't one day. But with the pig hearts work, we said clearly on the wall signage where the hearts were sourced from and how they were sourced. I wonder whether the levels of care that are built into the work—some of which are explicit—makes it less likely that people will have a negative reaction.
For myself, yeah, I do find that I walk on a line, and sometimes I’m challenged by myself. The chickens were one example. I'm making work at the moment that’s a bit different, and I’m asking myself, is this too transgressive? I'm working with native Australian animals that have been killed on the road—roadkill. Marsupials mainly, birds as well, sometimes reptiles. I'm extracting their bones in order to make small bone china objects from their bones, each one which will be a kind of memorial to that creature killed on the road. I do some ‘ritual’ around each animal, for example burying the parts of the animal I’m not using, back in the bush near where I found the animal, trying to give the animal a respectful return to the earth. The animals are dead so that removes the usual ethical issues around working with animals, but I’m dealing with animals in various stages of decay, and it’s confronting.
I was curious about the first time you started using bones specifically. Was it in the case of using your own hip bone or had you incorporated bone into other work before then?
I hadn’t done a lot with bone before. I've had them around the studio, always found them interesting. I did make a small work with magpie bones, in parallel with the hip bone work, but the hip bone work was the first fully finished work with bone.
Compared to organs, bones are still a very internal part of the bodily structure, but in terms of the liminality aspect of organs either working or not—determining your status as a living being in the world or not—your bones are the structure that's literally holding all of that up, and it’s what remains over time after a body's decayed.
Bones are so evocative, and yeah exactly as you say, the fact that we use phrases like “rest my bones.” We have a lot of metaphors and phrases around death that include the word bones. There are First Nations cultures in Australia for whom bones are incredibly significant after the death of ancestors—and in Western cultures, too. We don't rely on them in the same way, like if you lose your heart, you're finished. You can get away with losing some bones, but they're the deep substructure of everything; they're the scaffold that's holding it all together, and they're so deeply embedded in the body. There's something very deep about having some of your bone excavated and removed. I found that really powerful.
Habitation (Load Bearing), 2021. Unglazed bone china (made from the artist's bone removed during surgery, supplemented by animal bone), unglazed earthenware, felt, coral, metal, and acrylic,118 x 83 x 60 centimeters. Edition of 2 + 1AP. Photo: Dr Helen Pynor. Image courtesy of the artist and Experimenta. An Experimenta Commission
Did your initial interest in incorporating bone occur because you were also having your own hip replacement surgery? Or what was that kind of journey, in terms of that relationship between the body and the prosthetic, or the living and nonliving?
In a broader philosophical sense, it was part of my broader interest, but I didn't really channel my interest specifically towards prosthetics until I had this procedure. I was confronted by this idea that I'm going to have this weird object inside my body, and what's my body going to make of it? How am I going to build a relationship with it? How's everyone going to get to know each other and work together? Those kinds of questions.
As I started to learn more about the technology, it became much more interesting because the prosthetic is coated in a material called hydroxyapatite. So it’s titanium and ceramic and also has this hydroxyapatite coating, which is a material in human bone. The hydroxyapetite coating stimulates the patient's cells to grow into it, so they often don't use glue or anything to fix the prosthetic into the patient’s bone. They just wait for the patient's cells to grow into the prosthetic, and that's what glues it in.
I found that really fascinating because there’s no hard boundary between what's the introduced material and what's the human material, and at the molecular level there are going to be exchanges of molecules. The animate-inanimate boundary becomes so blurred. I drew on a Polish philosopher Dr. Monika Bakke who writes about collaborations that have happened over evolutionary time between minerals and animate material. Those boundaries were always blurred, and minerals have always somehow become incorporated into animal, plant, and fungi bodies. She even writes about how living organisms have formed some minerals, so some of the mineral species we have on Earth came into being because of interactions with life, and they wouldn't have evolved without the facilitation of living beings.
It reminds me of lichen! Being part algae and part fungi, it's neither one or the other thing and it survives in a symbiotic state. It’s weird!
Lichen's great! I've just been reading about lichen and learning about lichen. It's really weird in a wonderful way.
Collaboration with Peta Clancy. The Body is a Big Place (video still), 2011-2013. 5-channel video projection, heart perfusion device, live heart perfusion performance, single-channel video on monitor, soundscape by Gail Priest. Video production still. Photo: Chris Hamilton. Image courtesy of the artists. Watch on Vimeo.
To briefly touch back on your current work making the bone china, too, are you focusing on that at the moment or do you have any other work in progress or ideas you’re exploring right now?
I've just had my new work, 93% Human open in Germany, which is about DNA that we exhale on our breath. I did a residency with a genomics scientist Dr. Jimmy Breen in Adelaide in 2020 and 2021, and we were interested again in liminality, in this case around DNA. What does it mean when DNA is outside the cell and not in the place where we expect it to be?
We did an experiment where we collected a shared breath sample from the two of us, which we condensed into a liquid, and then extracted the DNA that was in our breath sample, and sequenced the DNA in Jimmy’s lab. The data that came back showed that there was 93% human DNA in the sample, and in the other 7% of the sample, there were around 6,700 microbial species, collected in 10 minutes of breathing! The work explores the whole multi-species nature of being ‘human’, and the fact that we're only part human–we’re human-non human assemblages of all these other species.
For that work, I collaborated with a composer, Amanda Cole, who has created a microtonal music composition. We worked with four classically trained singers who sang the names of hundreds of the microbial species present in our breath sample, in a polyphonic choral composition that Amanda created. A video animator Boris Bagattini designed a graphic representation of the genomic data from many of these species, including the humans.
The animal bone china work is in development, and that will be a series of small sculpture works made from each individual animal, resulting in a small object for each animal. In that work, one of the starting points is looking at the middle ear bones of humans, which are a vestigial structure from when we were waterborne creatures way back in evolutionary time, when we lived in water and vertebrates hadn't yet emerged from the water. These little ear bones were gill structures. I'm using the middle ear bone structures to represent the deep-time ancestral connection we have to other creatures, and also as a metaphor for listening and the need for deep listening, in a time of ecological threat.
The whole process of making bone china objects from bone is a really alchemical process, which is what I took my own hip bone through. There's something about those transformations that feels deeply alchemical and ritualised.
See more from Dr Helen Pynor:
Painting • Art History • Residency
Originally from Northeast Wisconsin, Kate Mothes is an independent contemporary art writer and organizer based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
