Bizzare Museum and The Bloody Art Exhibit
For Laura Splan, part of that is especially true: She uses her own blood as ink in her fine-line drawings.
Splan's show opens Friday at an appropriate place -- a quirky little corner of Chicago's cultural world known as the International Museum of Surgical Science.
Blood, which she obtains by pricking her fingertips with a spring-loaded needle, "can be at once unsettling and enticing,'' says Splan, who was installing a dozen or so of her pieces Wednesday at the museum at 1524 N. Lake Shore Dr.
People's response "fluctuates between seduction and repulsion, comfort and alienation,'' she writes on her Web site, laurasplan.com.
"I thought [blood] was a really beautiful material when it dried on paper,'' she added in an interview. It also helped her express her ideas about ambivalence many have about the human body -- the conflict of beauty and squeamishness.
Splan applies the blood using a sharp-pointed writing instrument. Hair-thin lines connect images of surgical supplies, such as steel bone plates used to help heal fractures.
As an art material, blood is "like a thick ink,'' she says. But "you can't load it into a pen [because] it coagulates too quickly.''
She squeezes about a quarter of a teaspoon into a dish at a time and uses a magnifying glass while painstakingly scratching the lines. Her modest-sized work usually requires only one or two bloodlettings, she said.
Does it hurt? "You get an idea and you get so involved in it you're not thinking about pain,'' said Splan, who grew up in Memphis and now lives in New York.
When first applied, the blood appears bright red, then fades to a brownish hue after a couple of hours.
Her art works are displayed in glass-sealed frames and fetch $500 to $1,000 each from collectors, some of whom are doctors, she said.
Splan's exhibit joins the Surgical Science museum's usual fare of iron lungs and Civil War amputation instruments. An earlier art exhibit included images created out of pictures of diseased cells.
Splan's show, however, marks "the first actual use of organic matter,'' said museum program coordinator Lindsey Thieman. Source: BY ANDREW HERRMANN Staff Reporter aherrmann@suntimes.com
