Jac Saorsa, Artist-Residence// Recent health problems have weakened me a little … sapped my energy and left me feeling somewhat detached from the reality I have been living in. But the new reality, the different way of understanding myself has forced me, gently, to consider my own mortality from a deeply personal perspective. Two ways…
Author: Jac Saorsa
I am an independent visual artist, writer and researcher in philosophy and contemporary art practice, primarily in the field of Medical Humanities. I am Director of The Broadway Drawing School in Cardiff, UK. I hold a PhD in Fine Art and a PhD in Creative Writing.
He says he’s never been to Costa Rica …
Dr Jac Saorsa, Artist-in-Residence// ‘I tell him all about Cyprus, and Lisbon, and Costa Rica … I tell him about the small town on the Caribbean coast called Puerto Viejo, where the jungle meets the sea with only a dirt road and a beach of pure black carbon sand in between … He says he’s…
The space in-between
Dr Jac Saorsa, Artist-in-Residence// My PhD in creative writing consitutes an exploration, through both conventional and visual language, of the presence and immutability of death. My subjects are the Living: patients in the hopsital with terminal cancer, and the Dead: cadavers I carefully dissect in a creative and subjective approach to the mysteries of individual…
Blue Death
Dr Jac Saorsa, Artist-in-Residence// Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness, even where Persephone goes… (extract from Bavarian Gentians, D.H. Lawrence) For Wassily Kandinsky, the…
The Quick, the Dead and the Anatomised: How a dissection drawing workshop morphed into an online event.
Dr Jac Saorsa, Artist-in-Residence// Each year since 2015 I have been visiting the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHID) at the University of Dundee in Scotland, UK, where, in the spring semester, I give an illustrated talk about my work in the medical humanities for the students studying for the MSc Medical Art qualification….
Mortality and ‘my part’ in it
Jac Saorsa, Artist in Residence // I am delighted to return for a second year as Artist in Residence for Synapsis and for my first post I would like to offer an extract from my PhD creative writing thesis, which is ongoing and is entitled Awakening Monsters: An exploration of the experience of mortality through…
The Art of Dissection
Jac Saorsa: Artist-in residence// (The following is an extract from my PhD in creative writing. A work in progress!) Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things We murder to dissect. Enough of Science and of Art; Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with…
Pathogenesis: A Visual Diary of COVID-19
Jac Saorsa, Artist-in-Residence // All images created for this special issue by Jac Saorsa, Synapsis Artist-in-Residence. Copyright Jac Saorsa, 2020.
When words fail…
Jac Saorsa: Artist-in-residence// In my work I make a lot of portraits. Some are of real people but most are ‘constructs’ – images created from my imagination, even if based on reality. All originate from some form of profound emotion. In all of the portraits I make, it is the eyes that, for me, are…
Cleft in wax
Jac Saorsa: Artist-in-Residence // As an artist with a profound interest both in anatomy and the experience of illness and injury, I am fascinated by the capacity of wax as a sculptural medium to emulate the look, and sometimes even the feel, of flesh. Since discovering the visceral qualities of wax I have created several…