Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr, Tissue Culture & Art Project
Born in Finland, Oron Catts currently lives and works in Western Australia as a tissue-engineering artist, trained in product
design and specialized in the future interaction of design and biological derived technologies. He is the Co-Founder and
Artistic Director of SymbioticA, the Art & Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, School of Anatomy and Human
Biology, University of Western Australia. SymbioticA is a research laboratory dedicated to the artistic exploration of
scientific knowledge in general and biological technologies in particular. It is the first research laboratory of its kind,
enabling artists to critically engage in wet biology practices in a biological science department. In 1996, Catts founded
the Tissue Culture & Art Project/TC&A, which primarily consists of himself, Ionat Zurr, and other artists and researchers in
collaborative projects.
Born in England, Ionat Zurr conducts pioneering research in wet biology art practices, focusing on the use of living tissue
from complex organisms. She has studied photography and media studies and is presently a PhD candidate researching
the ethical and philosophical implications of wet biology art practices. Zurr serves as the Academic Coordinator for
SymbioticA, and her work has been exhibited and published internationally as part of the Tissue Culture & Art Project.
Both artists/scientists worked as Research Fellows at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital's
Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory (2000-2001).
Victimless Leather
Humans have been covering their fragile bodies/skins to
protect themselves from the external environment throughout
history. This humble act for survival has developed into
a complex social ritual that transformed the concept of a
"garment" into an evocative object that cannot be taken on its
face value. Garments became expressive tools to project one's
identity, social class, political stand and so on. By growing
Victimless Leather, the Tissue Culture & Art Project is further
questioning the concept of garment by making it semi-living.
The Victimless Leather is grown out of immortalized cell lines
which, when cultured, form a living layer of tissue supported by
a biodegradable polymer matrix in a form of miniature stitch-
less coat.
These artistically-grown garments confront viewers with
the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for
protective and aesthetic reasons and further confront notions
of relationships with living systems, manipulated or otherwise.
An actualized possibility of wearing "leather" without killing an
animal is offered as a starting point for cultural discussion.
NoArk
NoArk is a research project exploring the taxonomical crisis
that is presented by life forms created through biotechnology.
NoArk takes form as an experimental vessel designed to
maintain and grow a mass of living cells and tissues that
originated from a number of different organisms. This vessel
serves as a surrogate body to the collection of living fragments,
and is a tangible as well as symbolic "craft" for observing and
understanding a biology that combines the familiar with the
other. As opposed to classical methodologies of collection,
categorization and display that are seen in natural history
museums, contemporary biological research is focused
around manipulation and hybridization, and rarely takes a
public form. NoArk consists of cellular stock taken from
tissue banks, laboratories, museums and other collections.
It features a chimerical "blob" made out of modified living
fragments of a number of different organisms, subsisting in
a techno-scientific body. With NoArk, the artists create a
unified collection of unclassifiable sub-organisms, and they
hope that, like the cabinets of curiosity that preceded the
refined taxonomy of natural history museums, the project
will be a symbolic precursor to a new way of approaching
the human-made "nature."