For Portuguese artist Marta de Menezes (b. Lisbon 1945), research laboratories are the perfect art studios and DNA, cells and protein are unfarrowed mediums capable of new modes of expression.With a background in traditional media, since her 1999 work Nature?, Marta has been exploring the fecund intersection between biology and art with invigorating results.
Having graduated from the University of Fine Arts of Lisbon, Marta’s extensive formal education took her on to study an MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture at University of Oxford, and then a PhD at the University of Leiden’s Arts and Genomics Centre. Since then her work has been presented internationally in exhibitions, articles and lectures. Marta is the artistic director of Ectopia, an experimental art laboratory based The Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in Lisbon, an innovative project she founded back in 2007. She is also the Director of Cultivamos Cultura in the South of Portugal.
Marta discovered the field in which she would situate her practise somewhat by circumstance, whilst dating her now husband Lois Grac during the fourth year of her Fine Art Degree. He was doing a biomedical internship as part of his medical studies and being immersed in the scientific environment of his friends and teachers had her seeing her artistic endeavours through a scientific mental framework. She now works within the intersection of scientific technologies and artistic concepts, believing it to be an ethically engaging space to provoke ideas about immortality, reality and identity. Speaking to Rhizome magazine in 2008 about why biology is relevant for artists, she highlights an interesting point…
“I also think that we are now living in a time where a lot of our metaphors are of scientific and even biological origin. We use expressions like « it’s genetic » without really knowing what it means. We, humans, are facing lots of challenges from our actions and their consequences for our planet, for our health, for our lives in general, and being knowledgeable about biology seems to be the best bet to find solutions.”
Far from ornamental, Marta’s work is created to provoke big questions from thinking viewers. Although some dispute the right of an artist to, for example, modify genetics, for decorative purposes, to suggest that Marta’s work is merely decorative may be missing the argument.
The advanced study of biological sciences is so much more than technological advancement of human knowledge – it is an exploration of the inarticulate wonder of the natural world. Understanding science in this context is a segway into appreciating the work that Marta and other bio-artists do within the broader context of scientific enquiry… and human artistic expression in more general terms. Looked at like this, biology is providing art with new materials, forms and aesthetics.
In order to realise her projects, Marta works in close collaboration with lab scientists. For example in Tree of Knowledge she created a new form of live sculpture, when she decided that the best way to represent a neuron would be to use neurons themselves. This required advanced cell imaging and tissue culture technologies, for which she was assisted by scientists from Dr. Giles Plant’s group at SymbioticA, University of Western Australia..
Nature? was Marta’s first biomedical project and is still widely considered to be one of her best, perhaps because it is such a joy when exhibited, as well as the fact that it raises troubling issues of what is natural, what is artificial and the role that humanity has in manipulating the natural environment. For this work Marta manipulates the cells of tropical butterfly pupa in order to change the patterns on their wings, creating patterns never before seen in nature. In effect she is making ephemeral artworks that exist only for the brief lifespan of the live butterflies. On its primary level this disturbs the balance between life and art and where the two meet, but it also delves deeper into what signifies artificiality. Though there is artistic intervention involved, the butterflies genes are not actually altered in any way. Marta is currently progressing her butterfly work in a new project called Leda, in which she will be inserting a human gene into the genome of a butterfly. Other current projects along the same lines of creating live art work include Zebra, in which she will attempt to give zebrafish vertical stripes to resemble their namesakes.
Of all Marta’s diverse and fascinating work, perhaps one of the most simple yet interesting projects to comment on in this small space is Functional Portraits, in which Marta eschews traditional methods of representing physical likeness and personality by using fMRI scans of the brain. These portraits are functional because they capture the brain’s activity when performing different tasks, thus representing a broad scope of emotion and intellectual material. Linking back to the traditional art forms she is building on, Functional Portraits include scans of her own brain whilst drawing and scientist Dr. Patricia Figueiredo, whilst playing the piano.
Marta de Menezes is a fascinating and truly contemporary practitioner forwarding the field of bio-art. To learn more about her varied projects and curatorial work head to her brilliant website here.
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