Paul Harrison: Epigenetic landscapes – until the 6th of June 2015 at the Edinburgh Printmakers.
Dr Paul Liam Harrison explore aspects of Epigenetics – “a field of biomedical research relating to changes in gene expression, phenotype and heredity as a result of external or environmental factors”.
Harrison brought in source material in the form of books by C.H. Waddington (who coined the term during his work as a developmental biologist and philosopher in 1942 to describe how genes might differentiate through interaction with their environment) and original sketches for some of the books by Yolanda Sonnabend from the Edinburgh University archives. (See some of the sketches on this blog post.) Harrison hopes to produce a limited edition of the sketches as prints.
At the deeper level, we find that most aspects of life and its interactions with its surroundings are interconnected into complexes. No powerful action can be expected to have only one consequence, confined to the thing it was primarily directed at. It is almost bound to affect lots of other things as well […] We need nowadays to be able to think not just about simple processes but about complex systems… We have found ourselves faced by a series of problems- atomic warfare, the population explosion, the food problem, energy, natrural resources, pollution and so on- each complex enough in itself, but then it turns out that each of these is only one aspect of, as it were, a Total Problem, in which all aspects of the world’s workings are inter-related. This Total Problem is sometimes called the World Problematique. Conrad Waddington, ‘Tools for Thought’
The exhibition is beautifully printed, the zebra stripe landscapes given extra dimension by transparent gloss overprinting and sectional framing. Sculptural elements referring back to children’s games of chance include hand made giant marbles. Finally an album has been recorded and printed with various interpretations (by scientists involved in the field) of “This is tomorrow calling” by Brian Ferry.