The MRI Scanner: An Ideal Instrument for Portraiture

Fig. 1.

Marilène Oliver, Family Portrait, four sculptures of bronze ink screenprinted onto clear acrylic and bronze rods, each figure 500 x 700 x 2000 mm, 2003. From right to left, the figures are Dad, Mum, me and Sophie.

© Marilène Oliver

In 2001, as part of London's Royal College of Art's graduation show, I presented a sculptural installation titled I know you inside out. The sculpture was a reconstruction of convicted murderer Joseph Paul Jerrigan, who, prior to his execution, was persuaded to donate his body to medical science. Once he was dead, his body was frozen and sliced into 1,871 cryosections, which were then photographed and the images uploaded onto the Internet [1].

Fascinated by the possibility of downloading a man from the Internet, I decided to "put him back together again." I screenprinted the image slices of Jerrigan's body at 20-mm intervals onto sheets of acrylic and then stacked them on top of each other. Jerrigan was thus relocated in time and space, returned from a digital to an analogue state. He is no longer decentralized, fragmented and prone, but centered, whole and upright.

Since then, I have become increasingly aware of a huge potential in the poetic subversion of medical imaging. The translation of flat or screen-based medical imagery into sculptural objects allows the viewer to identify spatially with the imaged bodies and to repair their fragmentation/dislocation.

My work continues to address new digital media in relation to the human body, particularly medical imaging and communications technologies. I wanted to work with living bodies, and to experience the process firsthand: What better than MRI-scanning my own body and the bodies of those I know and love?

MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) is a non-invasive medical imaging technique that allows one to make an image of the inside of the body through any plane, rendering it completely transparent. Portrait artists have long been frustrated with creating just a physical likeness of the sitter. Their true aim is to capture the sitter's essence, his or her character: what is inside. The MRI scanner faithfully and objectively collects vast amounts of information about the subject: It maps organs, senses arteries and the flow of blood, plots the boundaries of inside and outside. It tells not of the superficial—the color of skin, hair and eyes, the style of dress—but of what is inside the body, hidden beneath the surface.

Nottingham's Queens Medical Centre kindly agreed to give each of my family members a full body scan. I translated each scan so that it could be screenprinted onto sheets of clear acrylic. Once I had screenprinted each of the sheets, I was able to re-create my family by stacking the sheets in order. The result is a line of four sculptures: my family preserved inside out, hovering like shadows, forever (see front cover and Fig. 1).