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Changing Places: An Artist in the Laboratory – Exhibition on view at
the Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge,until 3 March

Life as an artist in residence anywhere cannot be easy, but those consigned
to the laboratory surely have it worst. Anyone who has ever worked in a
temple to science knows what I mean. Fancy having to seek aesthetic sustenance
in such a prosaic, down-to-earth atmosphere, surrounded by all that functional
junk.

But I am wrong to imply that ‘the bench’ and its output should really
be viewed in such a white, shadowless light. Few now mourn the passing of
the myth of science as Objective Truth. And to Jo Stockham, a young artist
who has just spent a year working in an old science laboratory in Newnham
College, Cambridge, the laboratory and its products are anything but certain
and clear cut.

Changing Places, the exhibition of Stockham’s work from this year, centres
on the uncertainty that underlies the apparent solidity of science and its
representations of the world. Her artworks unsettle our sense of location,
or indeed any attempt to map and pin down reality.

She makes inroads in our complacency partly by dislocating images from
their usual context; she transports scientific pictures normally safely
sequestered in textbook or laboratory into an art gallery. This movement
radically alters the way we see them. In the gallery setting her diagram
of a hair follicle, next to a sketchmap of the Mediterranean, becomes beautiful,
disturbing or just plain mystifying.

Stockham’s work also con veys uncertainty and ambiguity through transformations
of recurring motifs. Circles and spheres appear again and again in shifting
guises: she uses a wide range of materials, forms and contexts to try to
jolt the viewer out of certainty, and into ‘constant reinterpretation’,
says the gallery’s note.

Looking for a Nature: She/He is a series of three oddly irregular tessellations
of hexagons, pinned down to boards with dissecting probes. Only after staring
at it for some time do I suddenly see their origin – they are the inner
surfaces of dismembered footballs, flattened and investigated almost beyond
recognition.

Stockham’s work is also a powerful comment on the sexual politics of
science: the laboratory in Newnham where she worked was the first in which
women were permitted to carry out practical experiments. In Boundaries:
Sugar and Spice, Snow and Ice the form of a child’s dress, made out of brown
wrapping paper and dress pattern paper, hangs in a sugar-coated spherical
frame, of the kind that typically houses antique globes. It is a disturbing
image of the way in which the social construction of gender, often aided
and abetted by ‘science’, entraps and constrains girls and women, limiting
what can be imagined.

‘Strong images, sometimes with disturbing associations/ implications,’
is followed by ‘As cold and unemotional as science itself’ in the visitors’
book. Strange juxtapositions do disturb, but many will find Stockham’s work
intriguing. Ambiguity can be fun.

Jo Stockham was the 1990 Henry Moore Artist in Residence at Kettle’s
Yard and Corpus Christi College.