Colleen McLaughlin Barlow
Colleen McLaughlin Barlow’s art is a response to the beauty of the natural world including human and animal anatomy as well as astronomy. She has charted new territory by exploring these themes, which are usually the preserve of science from her own artist’s perspective.
Of Canadian and Irish nationality, Colleen travels widely and records her adventures in drawings, paintings and sculpture. Classically trained in Florence, Paris and Kyoto, her work is found in a number of private and public collections. She has exhibited widely in Paris, London, Tokyo, Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, San Francisco, Tucso, Tobermory, Oxford, Cambridge, Hawaii, Chile, and the Vatican. Her work encompasses sculpture, landscape, still life, portraiture and figurative work in a variety of media. Her art is also held in the National Collection of Ireland, Cambridge University and the Vatican.
An initial exposure to the internal human body at La Specola in Florence led to a decade of odyssey from Italy to Vancouver, Toronto, Cambridge, Oxford, the Scottish Hebrides and Vienna. Courteous sponsorship enabled Colleen to work in human and animal anatomy laboratories in these centres.
As an artist she has been exploring the topic of whales for several decades now. As a teenager, she was a signatory member of Green Peace in the 1970s in Vancouver where the then- small, grass roots organization was born with the famous ‘Save the Whales’ campaign.
One of her most unique bodies of work is ‘Whale Dreams’. Colleen says, “When a bone is made transparent it reveals new and striking internal lines which one cannot see in an opaque bone. It is transformed into a dream-like object, solid yet ephemeral, fragile and precious. I use the colours of the sea, seaweed, kelp and sky – the whale environment - to colour the crystal sculptures. I hope that people see the beauty of these shapes and also recognise a kinship with our fellow mammals.”
Whale Dreams is comprised of ‘portraits’ of specific whale bones which are individually sculpted into clay by Colleen. These portraits can take months of careful observation in an animal anatomy lab. When the sculptures are dried and fired into terra cotta they are then shipped off to a glass foundry where experts create moulds taken from the original sculpture and the mould is filled with wax. This is placed inside a large foundry kiln. Engineers specialising in flow dynamics figure out the best way for the molten lead crystal to feed into the mould, and the wax shoots out small strategically placed holes in the mould. It is replaced with the molten lead crystal. The entire kiln is then very slowly cooled – this process can take weeks. If it is rushed, the sculpture might explode and might need to be re-cast. It is an expensive process. All the pieces are originals and even if the shape is from the same mould, the colours of the crystal are uniquely different in each sculpture.
‘Inner Beasts’ Series by Colleen is a collection of x-rays from 100 years ago. “There were these astonishing x-rays from over 100 years ago at the Animal Anatomy Department of Cambridge University. They were about to be destroyed and the Director allowed me to select from a couple of thousand, a few, which I could use for the basis of art prints. They weren’t even called x-rays — they were referred to as ‘radio-graphs’. The detail was extraordinary and the lyricism of these stunning images is haunting. I worked digitally to create these images. Some of the x-rays revealed dance movements or contemporary sculptures or even ice cave landscapes. They were printed using spit bite etching as well as toyobo photogravure at St. Barnabas Press, Cambridge”.
