Untitled, Work made for The Anatomicum, Tartu, Estonia

Shocked. When you are shocked you are in a frozen state, unable to respond or to move on. Rationally I have no problems with bodies being cut up or cut open after death. However seeing it for real, I found myself abandoning the abstract generalisation of the body. Faced with a cut body, his body, her body, I was immobilised by the intense intimacy of surface detail. Unable to respond or move on. It is not used now, but the circular room for demonstrating dissections was a real theatre. So well lit that you could see with great clarity. Everybody on the benches must have been within a metre of the central table and positioned so that they could look down and into the corpse as it was opened. I spent a couple of days sitting on one of the benches looking down at the empty table. I watched some of the other artists deal with confronting this taboo in their different ways. I wondered if new students of anatomy were as disorientated as we had been. Feeling a little ridiculous (as someone of a different age, culture, discipline) I started to take notes as if I was attending a lecture. I wrote a speech for my voice and one for my body. Katrin translated the words into Estonian. With difficulty and much help (both the difficulty and the help seemed vital to the work) I learned my own text. …