VARKIE I & VARKIE II
2011
Elizabeth Gunter, HOD, Department of Visual Arts, University of Stellenbosch
Charcoal on paper
“I used a real pig-fetus as source material, which I borrowed from the SU Zoology department. It was a bottled specimen, but there were a number of them in one bottle and I looked at only one piglet from two different angles – that is why its distortion does not show the shape of a bottle, but rather that of absent sisters and brothers. A lone drifter floating as a somewhat precarious presence, as it were.”
We chose these works for the new Pathology Learning Centre because the superb observational skill demonstrated in these drawings is equally required for properly studying the pathology specimens here.
Also, these works reference and remember the great many pigs who underwent experimental surgery in the JS Marais surgical research laboratories (in this building), from the 1960s through to the 1990s.
JKY October 2011
