Christine Borland Interview

I arrive at the education wing of Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden and am pointed in the direction of an unusually small doorway. Sounds of great female merriment issue from the opening, and just as I reach it, a line of cheerful ladies ducks out, all clutching white paper bags, the crumpled remains of their packed lunch.

As my eyes adjust to the dim light, I find I’m in a little wooden grotto, with low wooden ceilings and fairy lights. Perching like fairies on the top wooden step are the artist Christine Borland, and director of the Fruitmarket Gallery, Fiona Bradley. Meanwhile, the other women have rushed back to their work in a nearby classroom, where the atmosphere is one of intense concentration.

Showing me to the classroom, Borland explains that the ten women each have ten engravings of medicinal herbs to colour. “This is a remake of a botanical piece that was originally produced for a show at the Glasgow Print Studio,” she says, “but the prints have been distributed and sold individually, so there’s no one definitive set.”

In preparation for Borland’s retrospective at the Fruitmarket in less than two weeks’ time, the artist has jumped at the chance to revisit the work. Copied from a 16th century bible of medicinal herbs, the engravings are, like the originals, being coloured by women, children and students. But the big difference is that in Borland’s version, the colourists are named instead of being forgotten by history.

Now that she has a definitive set, Borland hopes that viewers will notice the wide range of differences in the women’s interpretations of the same plants. “When these books were originally printed,” she explains, “they were distributed all across Western Europe, and a lot of them were coloured in the centres that they went to – so when you compare one in Tübingen or Leiden to one in Glasgow or Edinburgh, the representation of the plants is very different.”

That goes straight to the heart of the artist’s work. As well as identifying hitherto lost, human (often female) contributions to medicine, she finds elegant ways of pointing out that science can be as subjective as art. “This was the tome for at least 100 years,” she points out, “but of course a lot of it was what you might call inaccurate, or very subjective, as is medicine itself.”

Continuing our interview back in the cosy fairy grotto, Borland chats enthusiastically about her work. She’s softly spoken, but never at a loss for words. Every idea is mapped out with great clarity, and her quiet confidence is gently reassuring. In fact this friendly nature is vital to Borland’s work, allowing her to win the confidence of medical researchers, forensic scientists, ballistic experts, and a host of other normally inaccessible professionals.

Spending time getting to know these scientists, doing detective work and following her nose, the outcome of Borland’s working processes is often unpredictable. But she always get results. While in a biomedical research lab in Dundee, the artist became interested in the standard “HeLa” cells cultivated and used in labs across the world.

After much probing, Borland found what the researchers themselves didn’t know: that these cells once belonged to a 31-year old African American woman called Henrietta Lacks. She died of cancer in 1951, and more of her cells exist now, used in medical science, than there were in her own body. The resulting artwork, typically for Borland, is pared down to the simplest elements: Lacks’ cells are placed under a microscope, and the live image, bouncing and squirming, is relayed to a monitor. The effect of watching this dead woman’s body, in some ways more alive now than ever, is staggering, and all the more so because of its understated presentation.

Though Borland almost always enjoys good relations with her scientific collaborators, there was one notorious exception. Barred from taking photographs in Montpellier’s Museum of Anatomy, she sneaked in a hidden camera and took pictures of their shelves full of severed limbs, pickled foetuses and children’s skulls marked “abnormal”. The museum, which had watched the artist like a hawk, was horrified when the photographs appeared in her exhibition.

“I’m not interested in going in and causing a stink,” Borland insists, “but I really felt that it was an institution which was supposed to be about the sharing of knowledge and ideas, and they were closing that down. Ultimately I did feel it was justified.”

Borland is definitely not one to shy from difficult situations. That much is clear from the ethical dilemmas she has put herself through, working with real human skeletons and skulls, bought legitimately from traders in India. The fact that this was a regular practice in medical research came as a shock to the artist, and she felt compelled to make work addressing the issue.

“The bottom line is that I have actually purchased the skulls as a starting point,” admits Borland. “I’ve tried really consciously not to just be providing my own commentary about it, but to actually get in there and get my hands dirty.” After struggling with her conscience, Borland made two works which are remarkably tender, employing forensic scientists to examine the bones and reconstruct the faces, cast in bronze. The results, though far from a complete picture, restore some dignity and humanity to these forgotten souls.

Born and brought up in rural Darvel, in Ayrshire, Borland can trace her interest in macabre anatomical specimens right back to her childhood. “As a child,” she says, “I was given the gift of being taken round museums and botanic gardens by my parents, and I always remember the experience of looking at the collections of stuffed animals and relishing that.”

The artist learned a lot from her parents, including the names of all the plants and trees, and a robust attitude towards life and death. “My parents really knew a lot about nature,” says Borland, “but just in a very matter-of-fact way – you know how to kill an animal and cook it – and that was just a part of day-to-day existence.”

I ask whether her parents understand her work, and Borland pauses. “They’re incredibly supportive. I don’t know about understanding – they appreciate it. But there have been various points where not doing a proper job has been anxious for them, of course!”

Borland could have been a scientist, but it never quite suited her temperament. “I always got bored with the minutiae of things,” she explains. “I was just far too impatient to extract the bit that I was interested in, and run with it to something else, and being an artist, that’s what you do!”

Heading to Glasgow School of Art, Borland joined the Environmental Art Department, little realising how legendary her course would later become. Struggling to find inspiration in the mandatory life-drawing classes, she was encouraged to visit the university’s anatomy museum, where she found inspiration. “When I saw the pieces there,” Borland recalls, “I immediately felt that that’s where my work was.”

Things were to get even better, when the excitement in the Environmental Art Department began to take hold. “The group of people that I was surrounded with did feel really special,” Borland recalls.

“The friends that I still have from that generation,” she continues, “Roddy Buchanan, Ross [Sinclair, Borland’s partner], Douglas [Gordon], Craig Richardson and all of these people – they were actually in the year below me, so for a year and a half at college before I got to know them, I sort of thought art school was rubbish! Until they came into the department, and that was a big defining moment.”

That famous generation of artists, dubbed by Douglas Gordon as “Scotia Nostra”, resisted the well-worn path of teaching and, through the Transmission Gallery and a continuing sense of community, they fought their way to international careers, winning respect and praise across the world. Borland is no exception, nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997 and enjoying global recognition for her work.

Still in touch with her college pals, I ask whether Borland made it to Gordon’s party at Hallowe’en. “Yes,” she says, “but sadly most of us are going home at 10 o’clock to relieve the baby sitter these days!

Living in Kilcreggan (on the Rosneath Peninsula) with artist Ross Sinclair, and their three children (aged eight, two and one), Borland doesn’t travel now quite as much as she used to. “It’s extremely hectic,” she tells me. “There are a number of year-planners with things colour-coded. Trying to organise timetables, and being around enough, and not just handing over children at the airport, can be quite hard.”

Borland and Sinclair take turns being away, but she is quite emphatic that any residency she undertakes will now have to include her family. “I haven’t done it for a while,” she adds. “The last one was at Glenfiddich and it’s a couple of years now – I just had two kids.”

But there are definite advantages for the children, of having two working artists as parents. “Our childminder… always says she’s got terrible trouble getting them out the house,” smiles Borland, “because it’s like a nursery and a play place in itself. There are drum-kits lying around, and paint and exciting stuff all the time. They never find it so exciting when they go anywhere else!”

Borland did manage to fulfil her ambition to go to Kos recently, in preparation for a new work which will appear in the Fruitmarket show. There she visited the famous tree under which Hippocrates is supposed to have taught medicine in the 5th century BC. The ancient tree, falling apart with age, has variously been held up with stone, wood, and metal through the centuries, and the artist is taken with the idea that “this icon of medicine… is itself a sick thing to be held up by a crutch, a support system.”

Borland, together with her “eight-year old lovely assistant”, took detailed notes of the support system and is currently having it reconstructed here. “It looks kind of like a climbing frame,” she says, excited that this piece will be a departure from her normally quite delicate aesthetic.

The other new work for the show (the thought of a retrospective of all old work is “really a bit horrifying” for Borland) involves a second famous tree – that under which Newton discovered the force of gravity. Knowing that her show will travel to Lincoln, near the site of the tree, the artist has somehow managed to procure some apples from the legendary plant.

“I don’t know how I came to this idea,” she laughs, “but I’ve made a whole load of apple jelly from the apples!” As in much of Borland’s art, the unsung role of women is brought back into the equation: “There’s the association with this great man of science, but now I’ve reduced it to a domestic chore”. She grimaces, “and believe me, it was!”

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 19.11.06