Elaine Whittaker ARTIST STATEMENT

ARTIST STATEMENT

Inspired by an aesthetic in which art, science, medicine, and ecology intersect, my transdisciplinary art practice considers biology as contemporary art practice. This practice is based principally in installation, sculpture, painting, drawing, and photo-based digital imagery. My artworks incorporate a range of materials: from the traditional, such as paint, pigment and wax, to the unconventional, such as mosquitoes, salt crystals, cells, textiles, repurposed fibres, and live microorganisms.

I explore the forces that make us human, from the foundational processes and materials needed to form an organism, to the microscopic world of cellular ecologies. Within these worlds I also investigate how culture develops and expresses its fear of microbes. I am particularly interested in Epidemics and Pandemics and the emerging, and re-emerging, of Infectious Diseases as our environment becomes even more fragile from globalization and Climate Change – this unsettling time of contagions. Recent artworks have centered on the body as a site of infection, reflecting on narratives of hope and elements of anxiety that are found in popular culture, scientific research, and personal experience.