Cultural critic Mike Davis states that panic and ‘an ecology of fear’ is increasingly defining modern society. The cultural and social worlds we inhabit are being transformed in unexpected and often uncontrollable ways. Microbes terrify us: an invisible life form with the ability to invade and contaminate our cellular lives. Yet all of us are biological hosts, housing a vast and thriving community of microorganisms. Coexisting within us symbiotically, microbes mostly do us no harm. It is those ‘other’ microbes, the ones that cross over from insects or animals or different ecologies, that artfully become pathogenic, causing illness, or even death, escalating fear and terror.

Elaine Whittaker examines these fears, by viewing them through the lens of art and science. She considers biology as contemporary art practice, creating sculptures, installations, digital photography, and painting, using scientific methods and technologies. By incorporating live bacteria into her works, art and science aesthetically intersect.

We live in a porous world, in porous bodies. The possibility of being breached, infected, and losing body integrity is always present. Elaine Whittaker’s artwork explores this invisible world, a world teeming with microbial life, luminous beauty, the possibility of infection. Her artworks challenge viewers’ perceptions about their bodies, as sites that are continually trespassed, tainted, and contaminated by a popular culture that escalates social anxiety and terror of microbes by artificially creating a sense of bioparanoia.

Elaine Whittaker