Bodily Functions

Written by Gerald Beaulieu

Much of my practice involves the exploration and utilization of new and unique material processes. As a sculptor it has become self evident that my practice leans towards an exploration of the physical world through this material handling, which informs my work and contributes to its inventiveness. Many of the materials I use are direct metaphors for the ideas I’m exploring.

One of the reasons for doing this body of work was to meet a challenge I put to myself of working on a small scale. For years I’ve done large-scale works and numerous attempts to work small produced unflattering results. As a formal process, taking something with its origins in the microscopic world and rendering it much larger than life, corrected this problem.

The display format was designed to mimic the laboratory aesthetic of Petri dishes and microscope slides. Each element exists separate from the others. While pulling things apart and examining their constituent components is a completely valid form of inquiry, with 50 to 100 trillion cells in our bodies, (nobody really knows) that are all alive and playing their role, the irony is that our constituent whole is even more complicated.

 Bodily Functions will be exhibited at ARTsPLACE Gallery in Annapolis Royal NS, May 15 – Jun1 19 2011

Bodily Functions is an ongoing series of small scale works dealing with the physical make-up of our bodies as a collection of individual cells, organs and systems. The body has been a continual subject of my practice and these works try to re-imagine ourselves by looking at the ecosystems, the strange wildness contained within our physical forms. The works are deliberately tangible reinforcing the notion that our place in the physical world is defined by our own physicality and our sensory perceptions of the physical. These pieces are inventions, intended as metaphors and also an examination of the metaphors we assign of our organic existence, the essence of our biological make-up and the processes that occur, from infection to respiration to circulation to degeneration to regeneration; all events that occur within ourselves and the larger social context in which we live.