Laura Ferguson’s unique visual autobiography,
The Visible Skeleton Series,
explores issues at the intersection of art and medicine. These multi-layered works on paper are based on actual medical images of the artist’s
anatomy, including x-rays and a 3D spiral CT scan. Her drawings go far beyond medical illustration to convey the feeling of inhabiting inner space
— kinesthetic, visceral, and emotional — and the way that personal identity and even consciousness are rooted in the experiences of the body.
The word most often used to describe
Laura Ferguson’s work is “beautiful.” Yet, as medical ethicist/historian Alice Dreger has written, “Ferguson’s self-portraits are exquisitely subversive.” The body she portrays is softly voluptuous in the style of Titian or Degas, yet deformed by scoliosis: a flawed but perhaps more interesting kind of beauty.
“Transparent Laura is revealed as a composite of sensitive, sensuous softness conflicted and molded by hard, implacably deforming bone,” observes noted pathologist Dr. J. Bruce Beckwith. “She is able to express the inherently dichotomous nature of disease as something
both lovely and horrific.”
The unusual configurations of her inner space have challenged Ferguson to create visual balance and harmony out of asymmetry and physical differentness. In creating the portrait of one individual’s inner body, she reminds us that
we are all as unique on the inside as we are outside — and that each body has the potential
for grace and beauty.
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