Tineke Van der Eecken, Coral Island, 2024, fine silver, antique coral beads, quartz, garnets, 100 x 45 x 50mm. Photo Yasmin Eghtesadi

Mags Webster finds poetry in the marine jewellery of Tineke Van der Eecken.

Le monde est grand, mais en nous
il est profond comme la mer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted in Bachelard (1994)

It’s November 2020. After four years of reconstruction, the Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip re-opens in Perth. In one of the galleries hangs a 24-metre skeleton of Balaenoptera musculus, a Blue Whale, discovered in 1897 at the mouth of the Vasse River. It’s suspended in a typical feeding pose: the act of rolling and lunging, open-mouthed, poised to swallow tons of krill. Forever now bound to land and dry space, the structure of this leviathan nonetheless retains its original grace: dominating the gallery with the immensity of its architecture.

Fast-forward to now, and to an architecture of intimacy. Marine life forms, hulled beyond bone, almost beyond tissue. Fractals of airway and capillary, the inner becoming outer. Alongside, the clustered netting of a cuff, the clouded cyan of chrysoprase, clasped in silver. This is the world of Concurrencies, an exhibition of castings, artwork, poetry and objects by multidisciplinary creative practitioner, Tineke Van der Eecken, drawn from and inspired by the ocean.

Here, we’re introduced to a realignment of realities such as we’ve not seen before. This is memento mori recast—literally—into the very apparatus of living. Heart. Vascular systems. Reproductive organs. Gills. Stripped away from the prose of bones, here is the lyric of circuitry that once carried blood and breath and heartbeat.  Presence revealed through absence, absence through presence; a chiasmus of materiality and of perception.

One is witness to exploration, enquiry, uncertainty, experiment; to an exercise in diligence, curiosity, trust, and wonder. As French philosopher Gaston Bachelard might have recognised, this is a contemplation of ‘world immensity with [the] intimate depth of being.’

Woven around and through the works are poetic fragments that document the excursions into this intimate depth. As a poet and a visual artist, Van der Eecken’s creative explorations are characterised by a polyphony of the senses: her work intersects with the languages of touch and sight as well as of word and mouth. In these convergences—these concurrencies, if you will—of the flensed and the elliptical, Van der Eecken is inviting us to voyage ‘[an] indeterminate zone where the exact and the fragile converge’ (Connor, 2020).

An experiment in complexity: the art of corrosion casting

I am interested in where and how the scientific and the poetic meet

Annie Cattrell (2020)

An extraordinary sculpture catalysed Van der Eecken’s advance into corrosion casting as creative practice. Capacity (2000-2001), by British interdisciplinary artist Annie Cattrell, is a triple life-sized sculpture of human lungs, made out of flame-worked borosilicate glass, the same type from which test tubes are made. Cattrell made this haunting piece having examined corrosion castings of human lungs held at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

At the time, Van der Eecken was working at the Lung Institute of Western Australia, where mouse tissue is used to advance medical research. The encounter with Capacity made Van der Eecken wonder if something similar could be created with mouse lungs, using the corrosion casting technique that had inspired Cattrell.

Corrosion casting (permitted only to take place in a lab environment owing to safety protocols) is a delicate process that involves injecting fragile organic tissue like airways or blood vessels with a synthetic resin, after which everything else is dissolved. What remains is the cast structure of the airways or vascular systems: ‘a solid negative replica … liberated from its surrounding tissues’ (Cornillie et al., 2019).

This methodology, commonly used in anatomical and life sciences for teaching and for molecular and cell imaging, is in fact several hundred years old. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) made wax casts of brain ventricles and heart chambers of humans, but it was Dutchman Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680) who is credited with inventing the corrosion technique, building on da Vinci by ‘injecting melted wax, mixed with fats and stained with cinnabar, into arteries and veins to study capillaries of the lung’ (Doomernik et al., 2016). Nowadays, polymers and resins are used, and the process is (in principle at least) relatively straightforward. Yet to produce high-quality casts remains challenging.

A residency at the University of Western Australia’s SymbioticA in 2012 enabled Van der Eecken to explore her mouse lungs experiment. Subsequently, she collaborated with scientists at the University of Ghent in her native Belgium on corrosion casts of sheep, horse and primate anatomy, which were displayed alongside casts and sculptures of found objects like kangaroo paws and wallaby skull in collaborative exhibitions Tributaries (2021) and Arborea (2022).

Then in 2022, courtesy of a residency at the Minderoo Foundation Exmouth Research Lab (MERL), about 1270km north of Perth on the lands and waters of the Baiyungu and Nyinggulu people, Van der Eecken had the opportunity to expand her creative inquiry from terrestrial to ocean-dwelling creatures and, with the castings that resulted, to conceive the intimate world of Concurrencies.

Flowing into Concurrencies 

Art is a horizon of … open to the unexpected, in art’s methods one seeks errors; in its doing and making one embraces the accident’

John Baldacchino (2023)

The first castings at MERL (of sea snake and cormorant) provided ample occasion to ‘embrace the accident,’ due not only to the fragility of the tissues, but also the complexity of a process that hadn’t before been tried at the centre. Yet they also yielded renderings of snake organs and of the cormorant’s heart and airways, inspiring Van der Eecken to create, with copper wire and semi-precious stones, three-dimensional eulogies to the creatures’ original, fully-fleshed forms.

The next attempt, with a Major or Olive-headed Sea Snake (Hydrophis major), revealed the specimen’s entire vascular system: an undulating vapour trail or—ironically—a boa made from finest marabou, stirred by a gentle breeze; discrete filaments intact and distinct. Life, cast into relief by death, and attenuated to extraordinary detail. Inspired by the original, Van der Eecken picks out its delicate swerves in lace.

But two casts stand out as the most startling achievements in Concurrencies.

Tineke Van der Eecken, Ghost Shark I, 2023, vascular corrosion cast in methylmetacrylate, 350 x 70 x 50 mm. With thanks to the Neuroecology Lab, La Trobe University.

One is of a Grey Seal pup (Halichoerus grypus). A metre long, and still hinting at its original shape, it manifests as a pale scribble of capillaries, bronze-coloured heart and heart sac intact, nestled beneath the graceful curve of the extradural vein. These creatures are designed for extended periods in and under the water: no wonder the circulatory system, even in a pup, is so complex and extensive. Yet only a corrosion cast can reveal such an epiphany of vascular form and function.

The other is of the soft-bodied, cartilaginous Ghost Shark (Callorhinchus milii). Van der Eecken describes the tortuous process that resulted in this piece in her poem On casting a ghost shark: 

We inject heart muscle and arterial vein,
pump product towards gills, past capillaries
one blood cell wide to brain, trunk, fins, tail.

The poem’s lines throb with the heart-stopped, breath-held experience of trying to attempt the impossible: inject resin through capillaries the width of a single cell. ‘While surgeon preps scalpel and forceps / he warns ‘fish don’t cast’.’ Yet the miracle happens: ‘veins revealed in gills and liver, spine to sex organs, / phthalo green, clear white and iridescent blue.’ Many a scientist would not have seen the reproductive system of this fish, displayed in such graphic three-dimensional detail. This revelation—and the process that delivered it—is remarkable.

And the Ghost Shark somehow lives on, fathoms deep in the mind and imagination of the viewer.  A creature laced into the idea of itself, abstracted and subtracted into a network of gills, arteries and organs. Living a ghost life with every vessel defined, vibrant, glowing. Alive with the sheer beauty of infinitesimal precision or, as Bachelard might observe: ‘the infinity of intimate space.’

Resisting the site of loss

[A]s a vast presence [the sea] brings up the image of a place where … works of art, artefacts, and other objects are found. [S]uch a presence conjures up another sense of curation. A site of curation might also signify what could be removed or wilfully lost. As a site of curation, the sea is mostly a site of loss.

John Baldacchino (2023)

With this exhibition, Van der Eecken arguably contributes to ‘the emergent scholarly field of the Blue Humanities’ and the corresponding disciplines of ‘curatorial and museum studies concerned with ecology and sustainability, examining the oceanic Anthropocene through the lens of exhibitions’ (Syperek and Wade, 2020). That lens, more often than not, is necessarily focused on loss.

Indeed, most if not all of Van der Eecken’s work speaks to the loss of habitats and diversity of flora and fauna owing to migration, colonisation and climate change. ‘For years,’ she says, ‘my practice in creating jewellery and fine metal objects has consisted of making precious what we risk losing as a result of the pressure we humans place on this world.’

At MERL, Van der Eecken learned about the effects on the health and viability of all ocean species from over-fishing, microplastics, industrial deep-sea explorations and noise pollution from shipping and wind farms. Researchers are finding that human-generated noise ‘affects marine animals at multiple levels, including their behaviour, physiology, and, in extreme cases, survival’ (Duart et al., 2021).

For example, the Ghost Shark belongs to a subclass of the cartilaginous fish family known as the Chimaeras, close cousins of sharks and rays, which typically live at depths around 200m in the Southern Ocean, and visit warmer, shallower waters once a year to lay their eggs. Not only are the sensory systems of adults disturbed by anthropogenic noise, there is evidence that this is happening to their offspring too. A leading researcher in this field, Dr Lucille Chapuis of La Trobe University donated the Concurrencies Ghost Shark specimen to Van der Eecken’s casting experiment so that, through art, wider, non-academic audiences could become aware of this issue.

It is a challenge to us all. What if the only way of knowing a Ghost Shark—or a Blue Whale—ever existed is through its remains, or through research, as a museum exhibit, or as part of artistic and curatorial homage? With these exquisite casts, poetry, sculptures and jewellery, Van der Eecken and Concurrencies could be showing us the future; warning us of a future we must do what we can to avoid.

Yet an exhibition like this, with its ‘sculptural arresting’ (Cattrell in Bright, 2020) of corrosion casting also situates us in an attentive present. This scientific and artistic technique impels us to focus on and marvel at the mystique and beauty of these creatures.  Their concentrated reversals of body and form may seem so different from ours, yet still we are drawn to seek out the analogies of organ and artery, the complex architecture of heart and vein. We catch a glimpse of what’s hidden within ourselves, and so connect with our own ‘intimate depth of being.’

Tineke Van der Eecken

CONCURRENCIES, 9-25 August 2024, Alister Yiap Gallery, Shop 6, 191-199 Bulwer Street, Perth. Open 12-3pm, Thursday-Sunday (closed Mon-Wed) .

References

Bachelard, G. 1994. The Poetics of Space.

Baldacchino, J. 2023. ‘The sea as a site of curation: reflections on aesthetics education.’ HUB Journal of Research in Art, Design & Society. 

Bright, R. (ed). 2020.  ‘Transformations: Annie Cattrell.’ Interalia Magazine. January.

Connor, S. 2020. ‘Mutatis Mutandis.’ Interalia Magazine. Edited by R Bright. January.

Cornillie. P., et al. 2019. Corrosion casting in anatomy: visualizing the architecture of hollow structures and surface details. Anatomy Histology Embryology 48 (6).

Duarte, C. M., et al. 2021. ‘The soundscape of the Anthropocene ocean.’Science371, eaba4658.DOI:10.1126/science.aba4658

Doomernik, D. E., et al. 2016. ‘A comparative study of vascular injection fluids in fresh-frozen and embalmed human cadaver forearms.’ Journal of Anatomy.

Syperek, P., and S. Wade. 2020. ‘Guest Editorial: Curating the Sea.’ Journal of Curatorial Studies Vol. 9 (2).

Van der Eecken, T. 2024. ‘Ocean / Umbilical’: exploring ecological fragility through corrosion casting.’ N.p.

Walocha, J., et al. 2013. ‘Corrosion casting technique.’ In Scanning Electron Microscopy for the Life Sciences. Edited by H. Schatten. Cambridge University Press.

About Mags Webster

Dr Mags Webster’s essays, poems and reviews have been published in academic and literary journals and exhibition catalogues in Australia, the UK, the States and Asia. Her second collection of poetry was shortlisted in the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.

Tags

jewellery | sea | Western Australia