Colleen McLaughlin Barlow

Sun 5 April 2015 - Fri 1 May 2015

Murray Edwards College

Cancer led me to a dissecting room. I saw the component parts of us: you, me, humanity. Moved by the beauty of these structures, I began to draw and paint and sculpt in pastels, oils, watercolour, clay and glass – landscapes of mortality.

Upon hearing the diagnosis ‘cancer’ I was numb with shock. Everything about my life was to change. The gift of the disease was an acute awareness of my own mortality. I went to Florence to study art and a chance tour brought me to an astonishing place: La Specola.

It is an eighteenth century facility for the instruction of art and medical students. The models are life-sized and created of wax and represent every aspect of the dissected human body. There are hearts and livers, spleens and uteri, skeletons and nerves, sinews and joints – all extremely realistic. I stood in the middle of the room and wept at the ‘terrible beauty’. These were extraordinary landscapes which house the soul – structures formed by expediency and evolution. My mind was on fire with the intelligence of what I saw.

The initial exposure to the human body at La Specola in Florence led to a decade of odyssey from Italy to Vancouver to Toronto to Cambridge, Oxford, the Scottish Hebrides and Vienna. The courteous sponsorship of professors of anatomy enabled me to work in the anatomy laboratories of medical schools in many different cities. I branched out from the human body to investigate animal anatomy -- chiefly at the wonderfully rich School of Veterinary Science at Cambridge University.

Cost: Free Admission