A two-year collaboration between Trinity College’s School of Medicine and the Royal Hibernian Academy has yielded a moving exhibition of artworks, which was recently on display at the RHA Gallery. Eleven artists were granted generous access to the School of Medicine, thus permitting immersion in the worlds of anatomy, neuroscience and psychology, among others. In viewing the resulting body of work (collectively titled Apertures and Anxieties), we witnessed the multi-faceted responses of these artists to their encounters with the rarefied environment of medical education and research. These are works which hold and generate powerful affects, and it seems appropriate that they were afforded ample space in the spare white interiors of the RHA gallery. This granted us something akin, perhaps, to Winnicott’s notion of ‘an intermediate area’ in which we could experience and assimilate that which arises internally for us as spectators. 

The exhibition was deeply concerned with aspects of our humanity, exploring the myriad connections that render the physical matter of the body capable of exquisite complexities such as thinking, feeling and sensing. The images contained many subtleties and ambiguities, which collectively reverberated and echoed forcefully against each other. Eilis O’Connell played with the form and shape of dendrites in her elegant sculptural pieces. Andrew Nolan also examined the nervous system, creating books which are pierced and penetrated by needle-point, as though traversed and patterned by invisible nerve bundles. He re-imagined the body as a palimpsest of sorts, composed of layer upon infinite layer of delicate neural networks. 

Nick Miller’s paintings explore the relationship between the physicality of the brain and the nature of the human mind. How can an outwardly underwhelming mass of grey and white matter encode “a bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch”? asks Ian McEwan’s central character in the novel, Saturday. This question is mirrored in Miller’s juxtaposition of frugal representations of the dissected brain, with vivid canvases that are numinous tapestries of sensation, feeling and memory. His focus is on the amygdala, which plays a central role in the formation and storage of emotion-laden memories. These paintings expose us to a keen vision of the rich and vibrant sensory landscapes that arise at the radiant intersection of brain and mind. There are also notes of melancholy underpinning Miller’s work, however, rooted perhaps in the certain knowledge that cognition and memory can ultimately decline and fail, leading to confusion and loss. 

It feels as if there is common ground here between artist and doctor/scientist – both are interested in the relationships between body, brain and mind, in the connections between felt experience and the underlying structures that generate and modulate these experiences. Each endeavours to look and to see anew, to synthesise neurobiological insights with the grand theatre of human life. 

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Ciaran Murphy’s muted paintings brought our attention to the paraphernalia of medical education – microscopes, laboratory equipment, skeletons, preserved specimens. Tiered rows of seating within an empty lecture theatre brought to mind the students who inhabit this world. Megan Eustace honours the ‘silent teachers’ of the medical school – the cadavers of the dissecting room. Her intimate and sympathetic renderings imbue her inanimate subjects with humanity. Extensive dissection may have effectively dismembered some of the cadavers, but Eustace draws our eye to the gentle curve of a fingernail or toe, still whole and unmistakably human. A faithful representation of a neck dissection unsettles us due to the inclusion of the face above, unblemished and untouched, eyes gazing calmly skywards. Eustace spreads many of her images across a multiplicity of small postcards, implying parallels with the process of dissection itself. We are confronted here with uncomfortable truths about the fragility of flesh, and this was echoed elsewhere throughout the exhibition, for example in Aideen Barry’s cabinet of reconstructed surgical instruments. 

There is but a thin and temporary veil of demarcation between ourselves as viewers and the bodies we are viewing across these images. We are invited into a vast and borderless place, where the distinctions between self and other somehow seem removed. For those of us who visited the exhibition as practising clinicians with first-hand experience of medical school, it was interesting to observe the memories and associations that arose in response to these artworks. I recalled the sense of separateness that was required in order to tolerate my spell in the dissecting room, as well as my visits to theatre during clinical training years. Perhaps a certain kind of invulnerability is tacitly demanded of us as students and onwards into our medical careers, which solidifies over time into well-oiled mechanisms of separation and otherness. The outward focus of clinical practice on patient care, alongside the intoxication of ‘fixing and doing’, can sometimes compromise our capacity for self-awareness. We turn away from the undigested stuff of our own felt experiences as clinicians, from our vulnerabilities and from the impact of the uncertainties and exquisite ambiguities of clinical practice on our well-being. The title of the exhibition, Apertures and Anxieties, is perhaps apt; these artists have created windows through which we glimpse the unacceptable, the ‘awful’ and the numinous alike, connecting us with anxieties that are universal and timeless. Ultimately, however, it is this raw affect of our innermost self, which can in turn become the stuff from which we derive empathy for our patients that is authentic and sincere.