Artist, Josephine Pryde: My name's Josephine Pryde. I'm going to talk a little bit about the series called It's Not My Body. What you can see here are superimposed MRI scans on a landscape. The MRI scans are of a fetus around 22 weeks old.
In the work in front of you, you can see a furry cactus, and on top of that is balancing, somewhat precariously, a side view through the pregnant belly of the mother, with the fetus clearly visible inside.
The bright colors of the plant and the landscape and the blue sky behind become, in a way, the body in which this particular fetus is also seen to be developing.
The landscape images were deliberately shot under very strong filters in a very strong light, on an unknown island somewhere on planet earth to give a sense of a kind of science fiction taking place.
These days it's really normal to meet somebody, and he or she will show you an ultrasound scan of their child. And I was becoming kind of interested at the prevalence of these images. I'm interested in working with photography in a way that can look at all the different kinds of things which are photographs. I was also interested in investigating ways in which we could respond to developing technologies in this area and how what we see might influence what we might think.
Photography has a way of enabling us to see things that the naked eye cannot. And that very simple idea is one that's accompanied me through a lot of my work because it can be a starting point to try out all kinds of things in terms of asking the question, "Well, what is it that we're not seeing?"