Marilene Oliver: Confusao

Impressive works of the human body based on MRI and PET scan material
In the accompanying literature, Londoner Marilene Oliver provides an impressively idea-packed insight into the layers of conscious metaphor in her work. One line has particular relevance to what she does: ‘playing with disillusioned promises that technology will endlessly improve and save us.’
Conceptually and visually, the work on display here is highly impressive. It is a series of representations of the human body formed from designs initially procured by means of MRI or PET scan. The results are painstaking and often dazzling.
These include ‘Otzi: Frozen, Scanned & Plotted’, a series of pixelated points drilled into a freestanding case and lit so as to represent a ghostly, pale white cross-section of the human form; ‘Exhausted’, a series of engraved images on white plastic strips strung out as if showing a body dissected into thin sections; and ‘Orixa’, where this scanned human image has been once more ‘pixelated’ as a physical representation, this time thousands of multi-coloured beads woven into thin segments and again showing the internal contours as if part of a laboratory dissection. The effect is a nicely sustained tension between the transhumanist idea of the physical form reduced to a set of gathered data and the very tactile way with which Oliver has set about making these forms ‘real’ once more.
Edinburgh Printmakers, until Sat 11 May