An often overlooked corner of the Old Medical School, The Anatomical Museum stands as a testament to three hundred years of anatomy teaching at The University of Edinburgh. However, the impressive archival collection of anatomical models and preserved specimens should also be considered for its notable impact on visual artists within Edinburgh’s creative scene. Edinburgh-based artists Samantha Sharma and Rachel Stanley shared with me how these medical archives have influenced their creative practices.
Samantha Sharma is a visual artist and doctor living and working in Musselburgh. Currently pursuing an MA in Contemporary Art at Edinburgh College of Art, Sharma works primarily in painting, printing and textiles. Sharma received her anatomy and medical teaching at Edinburgh’s Medical School in 2003, and the anatomical diagrams and teaching models that hang on its corridor walls now serve as artistic inspiration. Sharma’s medical milieu injects her paintings with unique vantage points, painting on a cellular level in order to capture in paint her physical and emotive experiences, particularly of motherhood. Sharma says herself that she is “not interested in anatomical accuracy.” Instead, she creates painterly reimaginings and abstractions of human anatomy that animate the static things of textbook and theory. A small oil painting on wood titled Bifurcation draws from a memory of medical drawings of a blood vessel splitting into two. Sharma redefines her subject, which veers into figuration; I see a leaning figure whose limbs swing in a pink storm. A handful of her paintings possess similar anatomic names: Root, Mitosis, Egg, yet their expressionistic forms work to reduce the alienation of our own physicality. Memories of a large photographic image of an Oocyte that hangs in the Medical School inform Sharma’s painting Egg, a mixed media piece on board. Depicting the process of an egg cell preparing the genes that will be passed to its offspring, the fluorescent pink globe glows in the centre of peering eyes on its frame. Sharma’s work offers insightful visual representations of the stitching together of our concealed inner workings and our extrinsic experiences: “I am interested in the internal world externalised”.
“Chest a harp,
Veins a tree or its lichen
Cabinet a body in itself,
A case, A chest”
Lines written by Stanley during visit to the museum
Rachel Stanley is an Edinburgh based painter from Epsom and completed her MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the ECA in 2022. Her work is preoccupied with the weaving interconnections between natural forms and the human body. Currently working at the Medical School alongside her evolving painting practice, the archival medical drawings and models at the Anatomical Museum have served as a valuable source of artistic inspiration for her work. Stanley’s intuitive painting process is loaded with a keen curiosity about the places we cannot access within ourselves, the secret corners of our anatomy we carry with us everyday. Stanley’s Through, Under overlaps the boundaries of landscape and bodyscape, where an anatomical drawing of the hair root and the cross section of human skin has been interpreted as an uncanny landscape with red and beating roots. Edinburgh’s Arthur’s Seat appears in a 2023 work, yet Stanley’s fleshy palette skews the familiar landmark into a bumpy surface of veins and flesh. Slipping between the thresholds of interior and exterior spaces, Stanley’s paintings allow us to be aware all at once of the body we hold and the world they occupy. An object of her artistic fascination are the tonsils, drawing from medical illustrations and photographs from online forums. A piece titled Tonsil Stones places the viewer in the midst of a dark and cavernous mouth, the teeth peaking out like snowy mountains. Stanley’s surfaces are selected texturally to suit her subject; watercolour bleeds into cotton rag paper like a bandaged wound.
The Anatomical Museum’s curator is now encouraging its collection to be viewed through this artistic lens. The museum is opening its doors for certain afternoon “Art Wednesday” sessions, where visitors can bring materials and sketch directly from its rich and stimulating collection. See their website for more details.
Follow Sharma and Stanley on Instagram @Samanthasharma.art and @r.achelstanley
Samantha Sharma, Egg, 2024.
Featured image is Rachel Stanley, Through, Under, 2022
Images used with permission of artists