Laura Splan's Blood Scarf

It's not every day that you come across a seemingly innocuous image that makes you pause and reflect on the fragility of humanity and cringe in repulsion at the same time.  Artist Laura Splan achieves this in dramatic fashion with her piece entitled Blood Scarf.  Here is the description (and photo) of the work from Splan's website:

"Blood Scarf depicts a scarf knit out of clear vinyl tubing. An intravenous device emerging out of the user's hand fills the scarf with blood. The implied narrative is a paradoxical one in which the device keeps the user warm with their blood while at the same time draining their blood drip by drip."

Blood Scarf succeeds as a work of art in several ways.  First, the piece elicits a feeling of queasiness, garnering strong reactions from bloggers around the web, such as Wired and Craftzine, who express their uneasy reactions to seeing a woman wearing a scarf filled with her own blood.   Yet by turning the medical tubing into a scarf, Splan draws attention to not only the beautiful red hue of our blood, but also to its biological purpose of circulating nutrients and warmth to our bodies.  She shows the fragility of such a system, thus succeeding in creating a piece of art that brings attention to biological facts through subjective emotions.

Laura Splan was part of the Biology and Art: Two Worlds or One? conference in New York this past April, sponsored by the Haseltine Foundation for Medical Sciences and the Arts and the New York Academy of Sciences.  The topics and image gallery from this conference are well worth exploring.