Summary:
These arresting and beautiful drawings of a woman's body through which the interior skeleton is visible represent the art and body of Laura Ferguson, a visual artist who has severe scoliosis. At age 13 Ferguson underwent spinal fusion surgery, followed by one year spent wearing a plaster cast. Years later she began to experience pain and disability due to her condition. This was the impetus to try to understand her body, to visualize its skeleton, to undertake "an artistic inquiry" into the medical condition of scoliosis.
She learned anatomy and the physiology of motion, learned to read her own x-rays and was helped to visualize her skeleton by orthopedists and radiologists, working most recently with radiologists at New York University School of Medicine who provided a 3D spiral CT scan. In Ferguson's words, the latter is "an exciting new technology that allows me to view my skeleton from any angle, rotating and tilting it to match whatever movement or pose I'm interested in drawing." (Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Spring 2004, vol. 47, no. 2, p. 166)
Ferguson originated her own technique of "floating colors" to produce the layered background (on paper) of these drawings. On top of the complex colored background that constitutes the body's flesh in her work, she uses drawing materials to represent the interior skeleton, allowing the viewer to see both the body and its skeletal interior--but the interior has been exteriorized. Ferguson depicts a body in motion--bending, kneeling, reclining, stretching, twisting--as well as a sensual body--nude, with breasts and long hair; embracing, being embraced. Some of the depictions do not have a skeletal interior at all while some are almost straight anatomical drawings of skeleton parts.
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