Body as Soul
Colleen McLaughlin Barlow
The diagnosis of cancer led Colleen McLaughlin Barlow to venture into an unknown world. In a dissecting room, seeing the component parts of us, she was
touched at a very deep level by our fragile humanity. Moved by the beauty of these structures, she began to draw, paint and sculpt these landscapes of mortality.
The numbing and shocking diagnosis of cancer was life changing. New perspectives
and deep insights were apparent. “The gift of the disease was an acute awareness of my own mortality.” Colleen used the opportunity of the prospective foreshortened future to fulfill a lifetime’s ambition to study art in
Florence, and a chance tour brought her to an astonishing place: La Specola.
It is an eighteenth century facility for the instruction of art and medical students. The models are life-sized and created of wax and represent every aspect of the
human body. There are hearts and livers, spleens and uteri, skeletons and nerves, sinews and joints -- all extremely realistic. Standing in the middle of the largest room of the complex the ‘terrible beauty’ moved her to tears.
“These were extraordinary landscapes which house the soul -- structures formed by expediency and evolution. My mind was on fire with the intelligence and humanity of what I saw.”
That initial exposure to the internal human body at
La Specola in Florence led to a several year odyssey from Italy to Vancouver, Toronto, Cambridge, Vienna, Paris and Oxford. The generous sponsorship of professors of anatomy at medical schools in these cities enabled her to work in their
laboratories. At the University of Cambridge, she drew, painted and sculpted during ongoing medical lectures for three months and worked with students of the Ruskin School at Oxford University’s Anatomy Department.
Colleen was was
struck again and again by the similarity of internal structures of the human body and common landscape features -- trees, rocks, water and clouds; as though the Universe, having created a good blueprint, decided to use it again and again. So, from
the original chalk and ink explorations, she has progressed into landscape studies and analyzing animal bones together with the internal human landscapes which so moved her.
Now fully recovered, her work invites us to see the interconnected
beauty of our bodies and our world.
Inspired by the golden blue northern light of the sea and the craggy local rock formations of her family home on the Hebridean island of Inch Kenneth, Colleen McLaughlin Barlow travels
widely and records her adventures in drawings, paintings and sculpture. Classically trained in Florence, Paris and Kyoto, her work is found in a number of private collections. Like Henry Moore before her, she is fascinated by natural shapes,
particularly bones - animal bones, human bones - their elegance and timelessness. Many of her current sculptures in lead crystal glass are expressions of this interest. Her work also encompasses landscape, still life, portraiture and figurative work
in oil on linen as well as ink brush drawings.
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