The MRI scanner – An ideal instrument for portraiture

In 2001 I presented, as part of the RCA graduation show, a sculptural installation titled I know you inside out. The sculpture was a reconstruction of convicted murderer Joseph Paul Jerrigan (NLM’s Visible Human) who, prior to his execution, was persuaded to donate his body to medical science. Once dead, his body was frozen and sliced into 1871 cryosections, photographed and uploaded onto the Internet.

Fascinated by the possibility of downloading a man from the Internet, I undertook the project of downloading the images and 'putting him back together again' by screenprinting 20 mm interval slices of his body onto sheets of acrylic and then stacking them on top of each other. Jerrigan was thus relocated in time and space; returned from a digital to analogue state. He is no longer decentralised, fragmented and prone, but centered, whole and upright.

Since graduating, I have become increasingly aware of a huge potential in the poetic subversion of medical imaging. Translating flat or screen based medical imagery into sculptural objects allows the viewer to identify spatially with the imaged bodies and to repair their fragmentation/dislocation.
I continue to address new digital media in relation to the human body, particularly medical imaging and communications technologies. I wanted to work with living bodies, and to experience the process first hand: what better than MRI scanning my own body and the bodies of those I know and love?
MRI is a non-evasive medical imaging technique that allows one to image the inside of the body through any plane, rendering it completely transparent. Portrait artists have long been frustrated with creating just a physical likeness of their sitter. Their true aim is to capture their sitter’s essence, their character: what it inside. The MRI scanner faithfully and objectively collects vast amounts of information about the subject: maps organs, senses arteries and the flow of blood, plots the boundaries of inside and outside. It tells not of the superficial - the colour of skin, hair and eyes, the style of dress - but of what is inside the body, hidden beneath the surface.Nottingham’s Queens Medical Centre kindly agreed to give each of my family members a full body scan. I translated each scan so that it could be screenprinted on to sheets of clear acrylic. Once I had screenprinted each of the sheets, I was able to recreate my family by stacking the sheets in order. The result is a line of four sculptures: my family preserved inside out, hovering like shadows, forever.

When we look at Family Portrait, the bodies are vulnerable and frail (can we really be made up of so little?) – but they also allow us to contemplate the proportions, the architecture, the skill and scale of the human being……. We are more and less than we thought. We are movingly similar – her family is our family, is each one of us. In the context of the exposed, inside-out body, our separate personalities are temporarily erased, freeing us from the worry of self, into a united place that all of us share.

Jeanette Winterson, Intimate Distances Catalogue essay, Beaux Arts Gallery, London, September 2003.

published in Leonardo Magazine ( MIT Press) 37:5