Ajla R. Steinvåg (Vadsø, Norway 1975) works and lives in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. She has her education from Dutch Art Institute, the Netherlands, Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen, Norway, Glasgow School of Art, Scotland and AKV St. Joost s’-Hertogenbosch. After finishing art school Steinvåg did field-research into anatomy, pathology, prosthesis and implants. Steinvåg's work-method is closely connected to medical models and figurative medical sculpture.
In the recent years Steinvåg's artistic process has been influenced by medical and technological representations of the body, including technical apparatuses, appliances, bodily attachments and add-on's such as prosthetic devices and implants. Steinvåg is interested in the representation of the human body in medical models, especially the fragmentation and estrangement when a body part is separated from its whole. Furthermore, this is even more evident in the craftsmanship of replicating human body parts for medical prosthetic. Medical replicas have ambiguous forms, which makes you question whether they are organic or inorganic, original or duplicated, human or non-human.
In the lights of transplantation medicine, genetic engineering and new media, the body itself has become a raw material which can be re-engineered, re-manipulated and re-designed. Often, the research into high-tech medical materials and processes are points of departure for subjective speculations were science serves as a tool. Separated from its original context, the highly detailed body imprints and technical scheme’s loses its practical function, instead they are open for further deformations, as devices that preserves the physical properties of sculptures. In this way, scientific tools, techniques and materials are re-appropriated to serve personal desires, investigation into aesthetics and self-expression.
At the present time Steinvåg is investigating industrial fabrication techniques in regenerative medicine, were aspects of self-repair, self-growth and self-destruction is re-worked into raw and realistic constructions.
Image: Ajla R. Steinvåg Prosthetic Self-Portrait Canniesburn Hospital Glasgow 2002
