The beauty of disease

From grandma you can inherit antique porcelain, but also an annoying osteoporosis. Cruel fate? Not for Tamsin van Essen. Her "Medical Heirlooms" is an ode to the natural beauty of disease.

The quest for perfection and beauty is an obsession, an illness. Deformities and scars, stigmatized by modern society – even when hereditary and thus natural – must be masked with cosmetics or plastic surgery.

But Tamsin van Essen flings wide open the doors to the lazaret of our organisms incubating disease, and shows it to us as physiological processes in action on the flesh of conceptual pieces, inspired by the apothecary jars of the 17th and 18th centuries.

A metaphor for the human body, ceramic becomes the skin on which to represent a vast repertoire of physical alterations, but also the medical practices to cure damaged parts, leaving behind permanent marks.

We discover for example the ancient Japanese technique of kintsugi, where lacquered resin and gold are used to fill cracks and increase the value of a damaged object. Or suture points, used before the invention of glue.

With a scientific approach bred from a degree in physics and philosophy (and a post-graduate in design at Central Saint Martins College), Tamsin wants to cast a critical gaze on medicine, investigating the social and ethical aspects of our perceptions and prejudices.

Not to shock, but to provoke with the beauty of abnormal and yet delicate objects. Because a scar, as unpleasant as it may be to the eye, fascinates with the force of a life story. Both beautiful and mysterious.

















Photos via vanessendesign.com