Heart
Jane Prophet

With ‘Swab Drawings’ – video work in collaboration with cardiothoracic surgeon Francis Wells

Prophet’s work often engages with issues relating to artificial life and replication.  The award-winning Technosphere (1995) was one of the first interactive, online virtual worlds, allowing visitors to the site to design creatures with unique characteristics who roamed freely through a virtual landscape and sent news of their endeavours ‘home’, via e-mails to their designers.

In Heart, she subverts the function of an SLS Rapid Prototype machine – commonly used for modelling prototypes ready for multiple manufacturing runs by both the car industry and NASA.  Prophet has instead employed this machine to replicate, from an MRI scan, a human heart.

Reproduced at two different scales then gold-leafed or coated with silver, the structure and detail of the heart can be seen fully as it is in situ. 

Heart twists the idea of transplant, turning this vital human organ into a precious art object; a dual play on what could be seen as the ultimate commodity.

In the Swab Drawing videos, we are privy to an intimate moment as cardiothoracic surgeon Francis Wells uses a swab of the patient’s blood, during open heart surgery, to recall diagrammatically the operating procedure.  We look on as voyeurs as the surgeon prepares himself for surgery, ritualising his preparatory hand scrubbing.  Surgeons can see this washing as a way of necessarily disassociating themselves from the personal in order to temporarily see the patient "as metal, stone, or wood,” and to view the body “like a mechanical device that needs repair”.  We can peer into the open cavity of the chest and witness the pumping of the repaired heart, maintaining the same distance as the surgeon from the anonymous patient; the framing of the surgical sheet obscuring any defining features.

Heart was recently included in the Wellcome Collection’s summer exhibition ‘The Heart’.  Other recent works by Jane Prophet include Souvenir, commissioned by Meadow Gallery, at Hanbury Hall. 

The exhibition of Heart and Swab Drawings coincides with the Campaign for Drawing’s 8th Big Draw on Sunday 30 September. The national launch, Big Draw East: Drawing Things Together, will be in Tower Hamlets and Hackney and has brought together 34 organisations including St John on Bethnal Green, and the neighbouring V&A’s Museum of Childhood.  Themes for the day which are strongly linked with the exhibition include: inside/out; body science/body culture; and drawing differently.


For more information about Jane Prophet: http://www.janeprophet.com

All press inquiries to: thebelfry.org@googlemail.com, or ring 07981 924 196


N.B. The video footage is naturally graphic in content and displays the surgery in detail.