Fatemaps Jack Butler

The Red Head Gallery is pleased to present, FATEMAPS, an exhibition by Jack Butler.

FATEMAPS follows the destiny of three extended performative installation drawings at the intersection of developmental biology and visual art - Genesis 1982, The Body as Camera 1993, and Vortex 2019.

Genesis is the first work where I consciously followed an expressive aesthetic trajectory away from my scientific research practice as a medical model builder in human embryological development. The installation is an aggregate of these drawings assembled into an independent new work.

The title for the first iteration of Genesis was The Art/Science Painting. Critic and publisher, Robert Enright, titled his descriptive introduction to the original 1983 exhibition catalogue, The Art/Science Tables and the Metaphoric Presence. He described me as a “male Cassandra”, and my visual world as “the embodiment of transformation and symbolic reduction: hearts become cariboo heads, fetus shapes become seahorses, lines scramble into forms, absences become presences. The entire piece is like a prototype for a mural, or a tapestry design, full of repeated images and lyrical traceries. … The painting is less about focus than about poetic associations. It is a kind of wonderfully disorganised catalogue, out of which the viewer can order pattern, symbol, meaning and other staples of comprehension.”