For Alice: Skins and Bones to Hold our Living Nonsense Together

For Alice: Skins and Bones to Hold our Living Nonsense Together engages with the uncanniness of the Soas-2 cell line and the way in which despite the death of the original donor, Alice in 1973, the cells live on and have become separate and independent organisms. The title of the work is taken from passages isolated from John Ruskin’s book displayed in the central area of the table. The passage “…skins and bones to hold our living nonsense together….swallows with owls and milkwarts with violets, the classification is always given as tentative…” refers to the way in which thinking about Alice’s cells and the human body which is composed of so many different interconnected cells and other organisms is overwhelming and so complex as to loose all sense of logic, but also that our systems of classification and diving up and making sense of the world is arbitrary as everything is interconnected.

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