Notes from Glaveston (Final Post): Jac Saorsa, Visiting Scholar at the University of Texas

Week 9. This will be my final post in this series as my time in Galveston is coming to an end. My work in the anatomy department over the last couple of weeks reminded me however how much my visual practice – the sheer simplicity of drawing – helps me ‘think’ in a clear and far more lucid way than I do while immersed too exclusively in reading and writing. Drawing allows me to accommodate and nurture the tangential shifts of conscious thought that I find are inevitable, and indeed necessary, in my practice as a whole. The simple scratch of charcoal on paper and the precision required of the crosshatch have therefore invoked in me in these last few days a form of profound ‘consolidation’ of what I want to express, and where I need to go with the Drawing Women’s Cancer project. Communing then with the dead has created a sense of vitality that will go with me as I say goodbye to the shelter of the Galveston Sea Wall.

But it is only a temporary leaving…I have been invited by the Institute of Medical Humanities to return in the Spring of next year. For now then I will leave one of the drawings as a token of gratitude for the opportunities given me by faculty, students and not least, the dead, but I have ‘unfinished business’ and will return.

On discussion with the anatomy faculty I now have permission to post some of the drawings from the dissection classes here:

No more notes then from Galveston, and I would like to thank all those of you who have been following them. I hope in the coming months to post occasional essays here about the role of a visual artist in the Medical Humanities.