Harriet

2020

soldered metal

175 x 65 cm

Harriet highlights the formal and ecological relationship between the nervous and root systems. The work retraces in metal the nerves of Harriet Cole, a woman who died of tuberculosis at the age of 35 and who allegedly gave permission to Dr. Rufus B. Weaver to carefully extract her entire nervous system in the 1880s. It should be noted that Cole was Black, which raises questions of whether race influenced how consent may have been handled at the time.