LONDON.- GV Art presents Breath by award winning Australian artist Helen Pynor. Pynor’s new body of work is a captivating and powerful portrayal of the interior of the human body, introducing a visual language that is at once anatomically explicit and yet conveys a tenderness and regard for her subject matter that is refreshing, surprising and disturbing in the context of the body’s interior. The works offer new and unexpected ways to view and relate to our body’s interior which remains a largely unexplored and somewhat frightening domain for many of us. The exhibition is on view until July 2nd, 2011.

The unlikely starting point for this body of work was research Pynor undertook into incidents of accidental drowning in the Thames, inspired by her first year in London in 2009-2010 which was spent working by the river. Beguiled by the river’s shifting tides and lethal currents, she researched some of the thousands of recorded cases of accidental drowning in the river, from incidents involving hundreds of victims drowned in mass disasters through to those in which a lone victim met their end.

A highlight of the exhibition is Liquid Ground, a series of sumptuously produced, large-scale photographic images which depict languid, water-buoyed garments with bodily organs drifting out through diaphanous openings. Pynor shakes her audience by adding unexpected references to the individual histories of the organs she depicts, transforming anonymous representations of the body’s interior into those replete with the richness of personal and cultural story.

Liquid Ground offers a challenge to dominant modes of presenting the body’s interior, by rejecting the celebration of gore and horror, and likewise challenging the clinical neutrality sought within medical discourse. Despite the potential for morbidity in the subject matter, the works become strangely compelling evocations of our visceral fragility and the entwined nature of our biological and cultural selves.

In homage to the starting point for Breath the exhibition includes a series of framed, hand- cut Ordnance survey maps of the tidal reaches of the Thames. All but waterways and roads are meticulously dissected away, with autopsy-like precision, to leave delicate tracings that begin to resemble an obtuse map of the circulatory and gastro-intestinal structures of the body.