Week 1, Year 2
Here we go again…
The new sessions have started, and the three students in Block 1 have some interesting ideas with great scope for development. During the first week they are supposed to research widely and generate even more stuff which they can then refine during the following weeks while they write and revise their essays. Ideas thrown into the melting pot of our first tutorial include the role of plastination in medical & public education, notions of the “freak show”, exploitation, consent, the increasing public availability of medical images; feminism, infertility; artists’ interpretations of their own bodily and mental distress; the anatomy and function of the brain; evolving cultural mores;;;;
I delivered my expanded talk/woffle about drawing and was embarrassed to note how many of my own drawings I’d included. My defence is that a lot of the images I’d wanted to use were “unavailable for copyright reasons” (mainly on the Tate Gallery website) – which reminds me that I still haven’t heard from the publishers of Gray’s Anatomy about using Henry Carter’s illustrations. I think I shall just go ahead, and see what happens.
The life classes got off to a good start (thanks, Trevor) and we had three returnees from last year. Once again, I was impressed by the rapid increase in confidence evident in the drawings produced over the course of the two hours. None of the new students had been to life classes before, although all of them aready show considerable ability. So – I hope we will go from strength to strength, and with any luck I will remember to charge the battery in my digital camera before next week.
