I recently visited the art exhibition Wasted produced by Gina Czarnecki in collaboration with Professor Sara Rankin at Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum. Czarnecki is inspired by developing ideas in biology and technology focusing on how our progression in these fields could shape our future society. Her work aims to question our current understanding of medical ethics and how we currently use human by-products.
Czarnecki’s father was a concentration camp survivor and she visited the camps at a young age. Learning about how human fat was used to make soaps and also how socks were made from remaining human hair was perhaps what started Czarnecki’s interest in using human tissue for art. The Wasted collaboration puts together a collection of discarded human body parts resulting from necessary surgeries, cosmetic procedures and natural processes. With the recent progression in science comes new ethical considerations. Czarnecki has based her work on the concept of stem cells. Stem cells are undifferentiated cells that are able to develop into specialised cell types and have the potential to be used in therapeutic treatments. Scientists are also using stem cells to grow organs and today marks the day that scientists from King’s College London have produced a functioning liver.