The Skinny Showcase: Jamie Fitzpatrick

“My work looks at how genetic exploration and hybridity affect our perception of reality. By confusing the boundaries between species, human and animal, we lose a sense of specificity in the natural world. So, for example, the minotaur was half man, half bull. But he was neither a man nor a bull. What I find interesting is that transgenic exploration, the science of transferring genetic code from one species to another, is doing a similar thing in as much as it creates animals that are composed from parts. Glowing mice that are neither mouse nor fish, pigs that are neither pig nor man.

For me, the most interesting part of all this is that these animals are 'made'. They have not evolved but, instead, have been created. They are, for want of a better word, 'CREATEures'. By existing outside of the natural order of things, they to some degree operate as a fictional  entity. A kind of mythology brought to life. By creating ‘unreal’ organisms in the laboratory, modern science has become the vehicle with which imagination and creativity have overrun nature and evolution.

Jamie Fitzpatrick graduated from Duncan and Jordanstone in 2009. He recently spent some months in Florence as part of the John Kinross RSA scholarship, and now lives and works in Glasgow. He currently has work in the Hancock Museum in Newcastle and Shoreditch Town Hall, London.