material feminisms + tiny tools

Reading right now:
      Alaima, Stacy and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 2008.

To quote, "Focusing exclusively on representations, ideology, and discourse [of the body] excludes lived experience, corporeal practice, and biological substance from consideration. It makes it nearly impossible for feminism to engage with medicine or science in innovative, productive or affirmative ways--the only path available is the well-worn path of critique." (p4)

So far here, we're talking about the way in which feminism has wedged the body from itself through an exclusive focus on discourse and language about the body. It's as if a distance has resulted from the production of a narrative around the thing that ignores its thing-ness, and instead turns it into a cerebral product. Feminist materialism aims to fix this dilemma.

My miniature looms and weaving tools printed on Stelarc's 3D printer.

I do situate the work that I'm doing here at SymbioticA as feminist materialist work. I'm bringing decorative craft (weaving, etc) to the pitre dish, in the lab. My research is guided by both a hypothesis: that different textile structures can affect the structural integrity of organic bone growth, as well as guided by aesthetics--the aesthetics of science with all its sterility, labware and microscopy, as well as the aesthetics of the domestic, with all its beautifying, messiness and labour/physicality. Laboriously weaving a cozy cloth on a miniature loom and immersing it in a pink nutrient liquid in an incubator, handcrafting natural dyestuffs in the kitchen and bringing them into the lab for experimentation with tissue growth, working traditional textile materials such as silk yarn into laboratory practice for not only its profound scientific implications but also for its traditional, cultural aesthetic associations with femininity, finery and rarity--these are all my methods for integrating science into a feminist-oriented, textile-based art practice and vice versa. Ultimately, it is all about crafting the body or a disembodied, abstracted part of it, in the most physical way possible. It is entirely feasible that I could implant one of my woven bone structures into my own body and have it fuse with my skeleton. We would only see it through x-rays. That is perhaps a final stage manifestation of this project. Anyway, I haven't even touched yet on the idea of enacting pseudo-motherhood in the lab, as I foster orphan cell children, keep them warm and feed and watch them grow, speculate on their behavior and attempt to influence them and what they'll become.

The smallest crochet hook you'll ever see. Printed on Stelarc's 3D printer.

I'm not the very first to merge biology and domesticity/textile craft. One artist I reference quite often is Dr Catherine Fargher. She's blended storytelling, biological practice and performance into artistic pieces that bring the realm of the domestic to the lab, and then to the gallery or playhouse. I believe she coined the term 'mutated narrative', which I like to use often. Her paper, Evolution, Mutation and Hybridity in Bio-Performance Practice: Wet Biology and Hybrid Arts in the Performance/ Installation BioHome—The Chromosome Knitting Project was a definitive text for my preparatory work last semester.

You can see darker areas on the yarn where it pulled apart.

Today I dyed a sterile silk skein (a very small one) with sterile-filtered eucalyptus bark dye concentrate. The dye was filtered directly into a pitre dish, using tiny syringe filters under the flow hood, and the silk added. The silk was extremely resistant to liquid, having been steamed at 120˚C in the autoclave. However, eventually the dye did saturate the yarn after I poked at it for a while with lab tweezers. Then into the incubator it went for two hours. I couldn't add mordant to the dye because ultimately, I want cells to live and grow on this yarn and a mordant is the same as a fixative for cells - it kills them. The dye, however, I think will be extremely helpful in the cell cultures as I learned today that eucalyptus has antibacterial properties, meaning it will help my cell cultures from becoming contaminated. This could be a medical breakthrough! Ha, we will see what happens.
What I unfortunately discovered in this process, is that the autoclave temperatures are too much for the silk. It broke down the fibres by creating 'hot spots' on the yarn, which I only discovered after I applied the eucalyptus dye (the hot spots showed up darker than the rest of the yarn). After the yarn was dry, I tested its strength and it just simply pulled apart. Not useful for weaving. So, back to square one. I'll make new skeins, scour them in sodium carbonate again and sterilize them by other means - with ethanol perhaps. Autoclave is out.

I also dyed some decellularized hog gut, which shriveled and puckered in the pitre dish because of the tannins in the dye, creating a natural tie-dye effect on the tissue. It took the dye quite hungrily, sucking up the colour and hanging onto it. I'll spread that tissue onto glass slides and have a look under the microscope to see what effect it had on a cellular level. If there are still cells left on my decellularized tissue, it should show them up, or show something up.

My bone soup is growing crystals again, which means there is a problem somewhere, either with the pH of the media or with the incubator. I'll have to figure this out before I go ahead and thaw my mouse osteoblasts, because I don't want to kill these cells - they're pretty much my last hope for successful bone growth. All of my other cell cultures died because of the disaster with the warm water bath becoming a hot tub and cooking my media. Ooooof, that's a month and a half of work totally down the drain, and my beautiful Saint-Henry-the-cat-who-got-me-the-rat cells are a story that turned to its last page. However, this is how it is working with life materials. Unpredictable! I have a few C2C12s left, but they're struggling. Tomorrow I also get my 3T3 cell cultures to play with, and I need some good media for those. So, tomorrow will be about making more soup. This time, I really have to get it right. I could also try some more primary sourcing, but that would mean going to an abattoir to get FRESH dead bodies. I might also be able to get something from the morgue.

Also, today I met Sruli Recht, an artist who was visiting from Iceland and who is considering coming to do a residency at SymbioticA. You can check out his work here: http://srulirecht.com - one of the things he's done is to make a band ring from his own flesh, taking the skin from his stomach. He showed me where the chunk of flesh was taken from on his body today. The image of the flesh ring he designed is here: http://srulirecht.com/228259/2558967/all-things/forget-me-knot. I told Sruli that I was thinking of a residency in Iceland next and he told me he would have some contacts.