Faculty of Art

Cross-Disciplinary Art: Life Studies

Olivia Pare

Blood Smear

A light box displaying three translucent images of the artist's blood cells, off of which hangs a crocheted textile with inlaid doilies. The ends of this textile and the floor beneath it are saturated in paprika.

“Personal identity is often lost with illness. Symptoms are pragmatically assessed and the individual is confined to the biomedical, all aspects of life outside of the scope of treatment suddenly seeming insignificant. The medical gaze, while occasionally practical for healthcare practitioners, quickly becomes harmful. Particularly when it is unconsciously adopted by the patient or their family and projected upon themselves. Having witnessed the trauma of a leukaemia diagnosis and all that followed it, my relationships with substances like blood and bone marrow have become distorted. I no longer consider them a part of the self, but rather as an other, with the potential to cause harm. The authority of the medical field has assumed parts of my body so that I now see them only as diagnostic or prognostic tools. This has led to an unhealthy hyper-vigilant anxiety regarding my own health: hypochondriasis and psychosomatic symptoms.Through this work, I begin to reclaim these stolen pieces of myself, to impose the personal back onto them. Microscope images of my own blood are displayed in a way reminiscent of x-ray image displays. Juxtaposing this industrial aesthetic are the doilies, associated with craft and the home. This textile is saturated with paprika: a further imposition of individual experience, memory and culture on my blood, once stripped of all personality and intimate meaning.Made with hooks inherited from my great-grandmother, the draped crochet denotes family tradition while also alluding to personal narrative through the repeated knotting of a single thread. The use of paprika, another personally nostalgic element, acts as a tool for physical awareness, the mixing of mind and body. The images of blood are arranged from left to right in reverse chronological order. So, the progressive assembly of single cells into stacks is undone. On a proper, clinical blood smear, these formations called rouleaux would alert professionals to blood disorders, or sometimes cancers such as myeloma and leukaemia. Here though, they are a product of blood coagulation, an artefact caused by improper slide handling. The use of these potentially harmful aggregations outside of disease, the control over the factors that created them, and their photographic arrangement from general clumps, into individual cells all reflect the motivation behind this piece. A solely medical context where the individual is often reduced to, and generalised by diagnoses, is removed from these parts of my body. I am able to use my blood positively, void of any anxiety or detriment. Not to mention the use of a clinical process like blood smear analysis for the sake of art, for personal expression alone. Through this work, my experience with the medical gaze is reversed as a means of healing from trauma. ”