Bio-art a perilous pursuit

By ANDREW CLIFFORD


Los Angeles-based artist Joyce Campbell has a long and busy day ahead. With 13-month old son Moses in tow, she arrives for a final visit to her exhibition Deeper Still at Auckland's Starkwhite Gallery.

Then she flies across the international dateline to Los Angeles for the opening of an exhibition in an enormous wind tunnel that same night.

The Los Angeles exhibition, The GardenlAB Experiment, is an interdisciplinary affair exploring the way the planet's natural forces have been cultivated into a garden-like ecology.

More than 100 Los Angeles artists, architects, scientists, writers, politicians, pacifists and performers have joined forces for the exhibition in the vast venue once used to test aircraft aerodynamics.

It is this type of sophisticated interaction that 31-year-old Campbell, who was born in Wairoa and has lived in Los Angeles since 1999, finds attractive and essential to her own work.

She says there is a deep level of intellectual involvement in the implications of making art as it relates to politics, as it relates to the ecology, as it relates to psychology and as it relates to technology.

Campbell is best known for her work with micro-organisms. She makes photographic prints up to 9m long of complex emergent forms in the bacterial colonies she cultivates.

Enlarged to expose every detail, they spread like molecular automatic drawings into an ambiguous contamination.

She even has her favourite organism, the ever-present Bacillus subtilis, which she laughingly refers to as her pet bacteria that she can detect even by smell.

Campbell says the harmless Bacillus subtilis has been used by the military to trace anyone suspected of sending spores in the United States and for biological warfare experiments.

Campbell says there are risks to being an artist in security-conscious, post-September 11 America. "I'm really paranoid about it [making this work] this time around. There has been a great big hoo-ha because the FBI arrested a scientist quite recently, during my project.

"His wife died of natural causes but he was arrested because when the police came to pick up her body they found a DNA analyser machine in his house."

The artist, who was among the group interested in the environmental approach to art, had been working on a project to do with genetic engineering and food.

The upshot was that the FBI settled for a relatively less serious charge of mail fraud because he had acquired bacteria through the mail. "Well, I've acquired bacteria through the mail before because that's what scientists do - they send it all over the world quite freely ," Campbell says.

"I've had my fridge full of bacteria that's far more damning stuff than having a DNA analysing machine, because that doesn't actually contain any bacteria."

She had considered not going ahead with the work.

"When I did really large-scale contact-photograms a few years back with bacteria I was making enormous agar plates. There's no way in hell I could make them now in the States in a university. That type of artistic work had become nerve-racking to pursue because of the paranoia and suspicion."

However, it wasn't fear of causing a security scare when crossing New Zealand's strictly enforced agricultural border that motivated her shift in subject matter for the show at Starkwhite, in which Campbell enlarged images of crystals and plant roots on vintage silver-paper.

"Historically, I was starting from post-minimalism in the crystal space. What I was really playing with there - in very straightforward terms - was the object in the photographs broken through not by a minimal surface but by a large, romantic, extraordinarily detailed surface."

The silver-paper, which has a "futuristic look", is also a kind of historical reference. "Most of my favourite books from the 1960s have covers of utopian silver and black, and that really positions it historically as a really optimistic, modern treatment."

In these troubled times it's reassuring that science and art can meet to express beauty and optimism.

Exhibition

*What: Deeper Still, by Joyce Campbell

*Where and when: Starkwhite, 510 Karangahape Rd, to Sep 25