andrew carnie

things happen

andrew carnie is currently making a number of art works for the mendel museum brno in the czech republic

including the images bellow for the time based work 'things happen' a 162 slide dissolve work

Things Happen. 2006. A time-based piece on the development of genetic diseases produced for Genes And Genius, Mendel Museum, Abbey Of St Thomas, Brno, Czech Republic. This is where the Abbot Gregor Mendel completed his famous studies on sweet peas, which revealed the basic laws of heredity. The work looks at how a view of 'self' is developed, how we can now see we are so closely linked to one another, through the revelations made by geneticist's, as they uncover how diseases are transmitted through the corruption of our genetic code. The work was planned as a piece that explored some of the various genetic diseases that affect mankind. There was a notion that the work might be envisaged as a time line of the points of discovery of these conditions by those like George Huntington, Charles Hunter, Howard Henry Tooth and others who uncovered the roots of these conditions in our genetic inheritance. Some of these ideas are held in the final piece and some are lost, The work developed through dynamic conversations with Bernadette Modell, Professor of Community Genetics, [Dept of Primary Care and Population Science, Royal Free Hospital and University College London, School of Medicine] and Dr Caterina Albiano of Artakt, Central St Martins School of Art, London. These often tragic conditions that lie beneath our surface are encoded in or miss-encoded in the language of our genes. Each section of the work takes a condition and applies it to a body until it has its final outcome most often in the destruction of the body. I used my body in the case of this work; I felt I wanted some strong connection with the effects of the condition. Some of the conditions are fatal and some are not; they may affect the blood and lymph system, the digestive system, or the muscle and bone system and include: fibrous dysplasia, achondroplasia and alkaptonuria.

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