Claire Moore’s Experimentations with The Human Form

Intersection of art and biotechnology explored at SAG

Weaving together Art and Biotechnology seems, at best, an indulgence into science fiction. But on Oct. 1, local artist Claire Moore made fiction a reality at the Surrey Art Gallery.

It began in 2008, when Moore caught word of beauty pageants being held for landmine victims in Angola and Cambodia. In her mind, such an event  was a “weird concept, yet it made me think about the human body and what we consider it to be normal or not normal.” From then on she experimented with art that represented the struggle of people with “not normal” body configurations, titling her work “Life Lines and Land Mines.”

Soon after, Moore began to muse the idea of adding limbs into her work, rather than taking them away. This is where biotechnology mixed with art, allowing her to create “the postmodern self.” One of the artist’s most notable pieces featured a cluster of human figures that each sported a different tail attached to them, all made with wire. In her presentation, Moore spoke of human advancement and how far we’ve come, to the extent that prosthetic body parts can be developed with relative ease.

“Body augmentation can be helpful to the disabled, to accentuate one’s beauty, and to push what is unique,” Moore said.  She revealed how her work hoped to “embody” the experience of augmentation and “how [that idea] flows through art.”

Another piece combined a number of Moore’s ideas into one, in that it used small elements of body and modification to create something altogether new. Two  wooden crutches, ceramic vertebrate covered in words representing our reasoning for advancement, long strands of thick rope representing a tail, and a strip of tile of etched X-ray film. At first glance this piece was nearly impossible to comprehend, just an odd mash of body parts and assorted tools–but like an image that you must relax your eyes to see, the meaning of her work became clearer the more the artist addressed the concepts at play in her work.

Moore contrasts the past with the future, mixing genetic heritage with biotechnical advancement, creating a bio-prosthetic metamorphosis in her figures. She wanted to test the waters of “how we can deviate from being normal,” through her art. Each little puzzle piece of her work seems to lend itself to the other, representing a whole idea of our potential legacy as a human species. Our DNA, our very molecules become playthings for the artist, all to represent the way our own technological advancements can play a key role in our perception of self.

Essentially, the tail expresses our future, but being represented by rope it is a self-determined future, rather than a naturally evolving one. The crutches in the figure evoke those missing the essential body parts, the vertebrae symbolize the human drive, and the etched X-ray film contrast the past with the present.

From her initial idea of prosthetics and biotechnology, Moore worked through the concept of how we identify with our own bodies, and how easily that identity can be tampered with. All through the unification of art and biotechnology, humans can redefine themselves, and see themselves as a possible future iteration through these pieces.

In Moore’s own word, “Crazy ideas can become a reality.”