In April 2020 I attended a one-week virtual residency with a group of artists from across the globe. The week was set up by Odette at Cel del Nord to support artists working separately on their own projects in their lockdown places while creating an online space for conversation and support to set and meet our own goals during these challenging times. I had the great pleasure to work alongside artists in India, South Korea and Spain. All in some version of lockdown, connecting across cultures, limitations and physical boundaries. I can’t express how valuable and emotionally stirring I found this experience to be.

I’m pleased to have been invited to exhibit and present a talk to the UCL Anatomy Society as part of their Mirrored Anatomies programme. I’ll be speaking about my art, my BRCA patient experience, and a long-term collaborative project that explores the intersection of the two.

From the leaflet:
In 2012, artist Jill Mueller tested positive for a hereditary genetic mutation that is associated with a high risk for developing breast and ovarian cancers. When doctors recommended that she could significantly decrease that risk by removing her breasts and ovaries in preventive surgeries, Jill determined to embark on a creative journey alongside the medical one. She needed to reach beyond her traditional painting practice, so asked photographer Maja Daniels to join her in exploring the physical and less visible aspects of an emotionally charged process. Over the next several years, Jill engaged her medical experience as both patient and artist, through collaborative documentary and studio-based photography, personal artwork, creative writing, and research—transforming her art practice alongside her body.

UCL Anatomy Society exhibition:
2 February 2020, 12:00 – 6:00pm
Jeremy Bentham Room

Artist talk:
11 February 2020, 5:30 – 6:30pm
1-19 Torrington Place, London

Lumen present Through the Looking Glass: Humanity’s Changing Vision of the Universe, an exhibition of over 50 artists, illuminating how technology has influenced a collective view of the Universe.

Dates: 16 – 20 October 2019
Private View: 15th October 6-9pm
Opening Hours: 16-20 October 12-6pm
Venue: Ugly Duck 47-49 Tanner St, Bermondsey, London SE1 3PL

Click here for a digital catalogue of artists

From Lumen’s website:

Throughout history humanity has strived to understand our greater environment – the cosmos. Through the transition of new technologies, new evidence and logic-based thinking we have progressed from a view of early mythologies and seasonal cycles to philosophical models and current day astronomical concepts. 

The earliest human would have looked up and gazed at the stars in the same way that we do today. Through technological developments our understanding allows us to reach further, to explore bigger questions about our existence and the fabric of reality. 

Together, we have traversed through different answers to our biggest questions about the cosmos. For example, the Ptolemaic view of the Universe was an Earth-centric. In this model, the Sun and all of the planets orbited the Earth and the other stars formed a backdrop that also orbited Earth. In 1543, Copernicus published the idea of a sun-centered / heliocentric view of the Universe, suggested by ancient Greek astronomers such as Aristarchos. Developments by Johannes Kepler demonstrated that the orbits of Earth and the other planets were not perfectly circular but were actually elliptical / egg-shaped. Since then, we have discovered black holes, neutron stars and dark matter. We have developed complex theories which explain the beginning and eventual end of the universe. 

Alongside an ever-changing scientific world-view, humanity has found comfort and resolution in faithful worship of different gods and deities that help to answer their questions about the meaning and purpose of life. Today we have technology that has developed from Galileo’s use of Hans Lipperhey’s ‘Dutch Perspective Glass’ that gave us humanities first view of the four largest moons of Jupiter (Io, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa) and physical features on the Moon in 1610 to current day technology that allows us to see into unimaginably distant parts of the universe. Technology has allowed us to gaze so deep into the distance, yet we find it immensely difficult to resolve the figures it produces. 

Carl Sagan famously wrote, ‘All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star-stuff.’

The cosmos surrounds us; the cosmos exists within us. We live each day within an unseen symbiotic relationship between our immediate worlds (the body) and the wider influence of the universe encompassing our planet. And this intangible connection translates to the visual world through the similarities in imagery looking out into space and peering into human biology.

‘Cosmos’ is at its core an exhibition about our placement within the far-flung natural world. The 2019 show brings together 17 artists exploring the macro and micro, outer space and the human body, and blurred the lines between the two. The exhibition runs at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre (Oxford) from 6 June – 31 August, then moves to the South Street Gallery at the Churchill Hospital (Oxford) from 31 August – 12 October.

Curators: Jill Mueller, Martha Gray, Natasha Sabatini

Artists: Steven Barritt, Louise Beer, Amy Bonsor, Jenny Duff, Alice Sheppard Fidler, Martha Gray, Katy Hammond, Jane Higgenbottom, Deborah Humm, Marion Kuit, Julie Light, Cameron Lings, David Lunt, Daiane Medeiros, Jill Mueller, Sonya Robinson, Dominic Smith

Join graduating students for a day of talks, demonstrations and discussions crossing fields in art and science. I will be speaking about my BRCA medical experience and the creative journey that led to my degree show work Anatomy of a Choice, as part of a panel addressing the subjective experience in Art and Science.

Click here for a digital artists catalogue

23 – 27 May 2018
Opening times: Wed to Fri 12-8pm; Sat to Sun 12-5pm
Location: K-Space, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, 1 Granary Square, London N1C 4AA

Crossing Fields
Saturday, 26 May 2018
12.30-4.30pm

Julie Light and I will be holding two collaborative events in February 2018 as part of the Wellcome Collection’s Open Platform series in the Reading Room. On February 10, ‘Visible Interiors’ explores how people visualise their bodies at a cellular level. On February 15, ‘Invisible Interiors’ explores ideas around how we as viewers experience an artwork, and in particular how context or what we know about a piece shapes our experience and helps us make our own meaning from it. Open Platform is an event series where the content comes from Wellcome Collection’s audience, so that voices other than Wellcome’s can respond to the Reading Room’s themes.

I’m pleased to have my work included in an exhibition as part of TedX Whitehall with the Royal Society’s programme Changing Expectations of Art and Science, January 2018. We Are All Made of Stars: Matters of Scale (Box Set) links medical and astronomical explorations using images from advancing technologies: negatives from outdated star-mapping equipment and images of microslides of my own body tissue. It supports the idea that as an emerging, open discipline, art and science can evoke a sense of the human experience and awe linked to evolving understandings in science.

In January, Julie Light and I will be hosting two drop-in workshops at the Tate Exchange as part of Central Saint Martins’ week-long takeover to challenge ideas around what a studio can be in the face of financial constraints and diminishing space available for artists to work. ‘My Studio is Your Body’ invites participants to imagine their bodies at a microscopic level and contribute to a collective artwork by creating a microscopic portrait or ‘cell’ imagining the body. Visitors can take inspiration from invented ‘specimen tubes’ and books or work entirely from their imagination. ‘My Studio is the Art Gallery’ asks viewers to consider their experience with an artwork as its own creative act that encourages them to make their own meaning. Inspired by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s Evidence (1977) at the Tate Modern, we have curated a collection of photographs as an artwork that visitors will give a title and theme to. What story do these images tell? Each viewer becomes an active participant in (re)creating the artwork, giving it new context and allowing meaning to emerge that draws on their individual experience and imagination.

Pop by to join in on January 15 from 12-6!

Please come along to Printout, an exhibition showcasing a diverse body of work by Central Saint Martins students, technicians and alumni exploring the printmaking process, at the Lubomirov/Angus-Hughes Gallery from December 2-22, 2017.

Please join me 24-27 November for the Cryptic: Art and Science exhibition at the Crypt Gallery on Euston Road. Cryptic examines the relationship between art, science and technology, and features artworks that use technology and science variously as medium or message. 19 artists examine the relationship between art, science and technology, through diverse works including representations of time and the universe, form and material, genetics and evolution, emotions, climate change, technology and more. For more details, see here.

Please come along to CSM’s postgraduate auction at the Lethaby Gallery on November 16 to raise funds for our MA 2018 degree show! Funds raised will help support the installation of our show and the accompanying catalogue. A live auction will showcase donated works from established CSM alum and our student work will be available for bids as part of a silent auction throughout the evening. See the range of fantastic works here.

I’m so pleased to have joined over 400 embroiderers to contribute an embroidered pillowcase depicting a personal vision or thoughts about dreams to the installation piece 1001 Nights. This is part of Susan Aldworth‘s larger exhibition The Dark Self, inspired by her research into sleep during her 3-year residency at the University of York working with a neuroscientist and art historian.

7 June – 3 September 2017
York St Mary’s
Castlegate, York

I’m super pleased to be attending the Lumen Residency in August 2017. Lumen is a London-based art collective focused on themes of astronomy and light. Through art, exhibitions and seminars in London, and residencies, Lumen aims to raise a dialogue about how humanity understands existence. The two-week residency takes place in the village of Atina in a mountainous region southeast of Rome. The residency will finish with an exhibition at a local church, Chiesa San Francesco, followed by a later exhibition at the Crypt Gallery in London, January 2018.

Following two fantastic trips to Geneva hosted by CERN’s art@CMS programme, we are going to be exhibiting CERN-inspired work June 14-17 at Four Corners Gallery in Bethnal Green, London. It will be an exciting exhibition showcasing really diverse work and interests–including my piece referring to PET scan development as a part of CERN’s technology and knowledge transfer mission. Send me an email to come along to the private view June 15!

Em-em (embodiment and emotion) residency is a 7-month-long collaboration between seven Central Saint Martins’ MA Art and Science students and THECUBE in East London. THECUBE is a co-working and exhibition space dedicated to design, science and technology, and hosts a research lab focused on the study and understanding of how human perception works.

For the residency, the artists’ approaches investigate a range of themes in relation to embodiment and emotion, including memory and objects, sensory perception and colour, gravity, dis-embodiment, and where emotions reside in the body. Our explorations manifest through diverse media including—but not limited to—sculpture, installation, painting on paper and glass and photo collage.

Through the em-em residency, we aim to bring new perspectives to current dialogues around mind and body, building bridges between disciplines. Our work and interests will be shared through an exhibition and a series of talks open to the public. Participants: Allison Barclay, Monika Dorniak, Julie Light, Jill Mueller, Lisa Pettibone, Virginie Serneels, and Eleonora Sher

Visitor Information:
Private View: Thursday, 27 April, 2017, 6 – 9pm
Open to the Public: By arrangement, 27 April – 31 August, 2017
THECUBE: Studio 5, 155 Commercial Street, London E1 6BJ

Please come along and see what I’ve been up to! Still contemplating genetics and mutation but straying further afield in my technique and materials… Come find my collaborative piece that is taller than me and involves steel rods, red light and a motor!

Please come along December 7 from 2-8pm to see work in progress, experiments and performances from me and 39 classmates, all interdisciplinary practitioners exploring the interconnections between art and science. There is some amazing work happening here!

Central Saint Martins Archway Campus, Elthorne Studios, 9-15 Elthorne Road, London N19 4AJ