Meeting Place: Jacqueline Donachie & Professor Darren G. Monckton

MEETING PLACE: Jacqueline Donachie &
Professor Darren G. Monckton
Thursday 10 January 2013  / 18.30  / FREE
BALTIC 39, 31-39 High Bridge, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 1EW
Booking required, please call 0191 478 1810 or e-mail events@balticmill.com

The next Meeting Place conversation will be between Scottish artist Jacqueline Donachie and Darren G. Monckton, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Glasgow.

Meeting Place is a regular series of informal exchanges and conversations, held at BALTIC 39. These intimate Salon-style discussions are interdisciplinary and designed to explore the ways artists collaborate with experts in the fields of science, the environment, health and medicine to generate new research and artwork. Developed by BALTIC Professor of Contemporary Art, Christine Borland and BALTIC Curator of Exhibitions & Research, Alessandro Vincentelli.

Their project Tomorrow Belongs to Me is the result of a five year collaboration, 2001-2006, following the diagnosis of myotonic dystrophy, a form of inherited muscular dystrophy in the artist’s family. The project specifically looked at ‘anticipation,’ the phenomenon of certain forms of inherited genetic disorders progressively showing at earlier stages and worsening from generation to generation. The Tomorrow Belongs to Me research and project was presented as an exhibition at the Hunterian Museum & Art Gallery, Glasgow, and included a film, DVD archive, sculpture and photography and accompanying publication with interview transcripts. The project was funded by a SciArt production award from the Wellcome Trust.

Jacqueline Donachie is a Scottish artist, graduating in the early 90’s from The Glasgow School of Art's influential Environmental Art department. One of a group of artists who helped establish Glasgow in the 1990s as one of the world's most dynamic contemporary art communities, she is still based in the city and has forged an international reputation for a socially-engaged, collaborative art practice, with a special interest in public space, healthcare and bio-medical research. She is currently doing a practice-led PhD at Northumbria University looking at how artworks can influence Science.

Darren G. Monckton is Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Glasgow and his research interest is the role of tandemly repeated DNA sequences in the human genome and their relationship to inherited disease. In particular, ongoing work is focused on the CTG repeat within the gene associated with the inherited human disorder, myotonic dystrophy.