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"Gorgeous ... beautiful ... sensitive" are some of the words you might expect to hear at an exhibition of art.

But UWA's tissue culture artists at SymbioticA are more interested in touching raw nerves than metaphorical heartstrings.

Their tenth anniversary exhibition, Visceral , at the Science Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, stunned visitors and spawned complimentary reviews in prestigious journals Nature and Science .

Artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr have not disappointed their fans since Oron began the Tissue Culture and Art Project more than 15 years ago, after visiting the UWA laboratory of Professor Miranda Grounds in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology.

Their visual ‘bioart' is often confronting and challenging but gets viewers thinking and talking about the ethical and moral issues associated with tissue engineering and research. All of the 15 pieces in the Dublin exhibition used living biomaterials.

SymbioticA does not yet have a dedicated exhibition space a UWA, and the artists' work has probably had more impact outside of WA.

Oron and Ionat's Semi-Living Worry Dolls , one of their first creations, was made from degradable polymers and surgical sutures, and seeded with living cells.

Kathy High's Blood Wars used the donated blood of volunteers to stage a contest between their white blood cells in a Petri dish. Kathy told Nature that she wanted to highlight a debate about blood traits and inherited diseases. The artist has Crohn's disease and suggested that her cells were at an advantage in the contest because they were sensitive to foreign cells.

An exhibit called The Vision Splendid has living tissue from cells, bought online, originally obtained in 1969 from a 13-year-old African-American girl. Nature reports: "We are asked to ponder how many of her cells may now live beyond her original body."

Oron told Nature that what was happening in life sciences now was exciting. "We don't really have a cultural language to engage with it. We can't articulate it outside of the science lab."

Science described the exhibition as "wondrous and unsettling, spectacular and deeply felt."

Published in UWA News , 21 March 2011