Director Michael Esson is a senior lecturer in COFA’s School of Art. He is also the director of the International Drawing Research Institute, an initiative comprised of three founding members: COFA, UNSW in Sydney, China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and Glasgow School of Art. Esson’s research is part of a wider cultural climate, forging links between art, anatomy and surgery. In 2005, he received the position of honorary Visiting Professor of Drawing at Dong Hua University, Shanghai, leading eventually to his participation in the 2009 Shanghai Fashion and Cultural Festival.
Although working in a broad range of disciplines within the visual arts, the core of his art practise has been the study, interpretation and expression of the human figure through the drawing process. This has been the focus of his 18 major solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions.
In 1993 – 94 he was the first artist in residence at the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, where he focused upon a long-standing concern with the exploration of the body; its’ structure, anatomy and ideas of mortality and identity.
Having access to view reconstructive surgery gave him a rare opportunity of observing at first hand the brutal yet sensitive intervention of medical science on the human body. Identifying with the vulnerability of the patient and the dispassionate technique of the surgeon he projects his own alter ego as an artist.
The practise of art is always a means of getting to know oneself and so there is frequently the recurrent theme of self-portraiture in his work where he is at the same time the observer and the observed, the artist and the model.
THE ART OF SURGERY
Added: 19 Feb 2009
Leading plastic surgeons swap scalpels for charcoal and clay to learn the artistic principles associated with the human form and take their new skills back into surgical practice.
