Hippocrates Promise, the title of the first in this series named after the well-known oath to do no harm, developed over several years into a preoccupation with the dynamics of capacity and its opposite. Limbed forms, appendages and hardware are assembled into a range of tableaus, an operating stage for the re-enactment of the healing process. The act of forging or casting steel components and fabricating pulley systems used in orthopedic traction, become metaphorical labors of repair. The artificial space of a gallery simulates the sterile space of a hospital environment. Here the colliding bodies we hide away, the bodies we will become someday, the bodies that decay, that heal and die, are revealed.
This work has undergone multiple transformations and was most recently exhibited: Perception and Ability, March 10-May 26, 2013, curated by Gabriel Buzgo at the Evergreen Museum.
The Language of Objects, Maryland State Arts Council 2010, curated by Beverly Ress
Above: Hippocrates Promise on exhibit at the Evergreen Museum, 2013
Detail images, Hippocrates Promise: Materials: cast aluminum, cast iron, bronze, steel, wood, copper rivets.
Sketchbooks: Wie Sie es Sehen, on display stand in vitrine, Perception and Ability, Evergreen Museum, 2013
Shown with a facsimile of the cover, installed by the curator Gabriele Buzgo.
Last stage of Hippocrates Promise:
Here I removed the tableau in order to animate the form, the logical end of Hippocrates Promise is Fantasy of Ability. The experience of the work is now a visceral participation in the limited movement of a fetishized, almost unrecognizable lower limb.
All Photos: ©breongilleran
Feel for Steel 
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