Output details

FLEX + PLY Textile Metaphors For Anatomy. An Exhibition

Fleming was Principal Investigator of ‘FLEX and PLY’, a Wellcome Trust Large Arts Award with medical educators at Durham led by McLachlan. This work followed output 3 and employed mixed methods and a grounded theory approach to develop knowledge and aesthetic consideration of other clinically significant invisible maps of the body that rely less on boney landmarks - Blashko and Langer lines*.

The outcome is artworks, mostly large scale, digitally printed and often woven in a technically challenging and innovative digital warp printing process with visiting professor Paul Turnbull. This produced double sided images at greater than life size. Fleming’s initial consideration was of how the visualisations of these phenomenons came to be represented in the best-known forms or maps. Content analysis (Nvivo9) was applied to the development of the 20th century maps alongside a comparative analysis of published studies.

Observations about attitudes to the ‘anatomy position’ within the medical fraternity, among publishers and the general public informed the other poses employed and the asymmetrical motion.

This Blaschko and Langer Lines body of work was first shown at the Hunterian Museum of Anatomy, Glasgow (2010) to co-incide with the AMEE conference; it toured to Flowerfield Art Centre and to 2 venues in the largest hospital in Europe – James Cook- to be a key event in National Pathology Week (2010) and to Beijing and Shangha (2013). A projection was then developed on to the Georgian wing of Flowerfield Arts Centre for Europe-wide Paint a Building Blue for World Diabetes Day. (2010). The use of art processes to interrogate 2D mapping was presented/ demonstrated in a number of conferences *Simply put- Langer lines are lines of skin tension, rather like the grain in fabric; Blashko Lines are lines of clonal expansion.