'Narrative Remains' is a collaboration between
artist and writer Karen Ingham and the Hunterian Museum. This film
accompanied a site-specific installation at the Hunterian, which
contains a large number of 'wet specimens', preserved elements of
human anatomy, collected by the anatomist John Hunter.
Ingham's work brings the dead back to life
through their displayed organs, giving the patients a voice and a
narrative that connects to the preserved specimen. One such is the
throat of Marianne Harland, a musically talented young woman who
lost first her famed voice, and then her life, to tuberculosis.
Narrative Remains, Ingham hopes, will "help to
stimulate informed discussion around the retention, preservation,
study and display of preserved body parts,"but is not merely about
engagement with medical history. It is also about " the power of
art to transform and provoke; to bring to life what at first glance
appear to be still, dead objects; to animate the inanimate."
Narrative Remains was funded by a
Wellcome Trust Arts Award.