Paddy Hartley in the Dental Institute

Three major bodies of work titled Bioglass Implants and Face Corsets, Project Facade, and Papaver Rhoeas, each funded by The Wellcome Trust, have emerged as a result of Paddy and Ian's collaborations over the past 15 years and have been exhibited at major international museums and institutions.

Bioglass Implants and Face Corsets, 2002–3

Paddy and Ian's first collaboration was on the Bioglass Implants and Face Corsets project which began as an invitation from the Victoria & Albert Museum to create commissioned work for the event Short Cuts to Beauty.

The event gathered scientists, artists, surgeons, models and beauty editors to present a series of pop up events throughout the museum, examining cultural attitudes to beauty and the way in which we change our appearance both temporarily and permanently. Paddy created a series of facial garments, called 'face corsets’, designed to reconfigure the soft tissue of the face in the same way a corset shapes the body. In his desire to incorporate commercially available facial implants into the face corsets, Paddy teamed up with Ian, whose groundbreaking work with Bioglass as an implant material became a focus of their collaborative partnership.

Drawing on Paddy’s training in ceramics and experience in wax casting, their collaboration resulted in techniques of producing patient-specific implants for the repair of bone injury and defects in the face. Supported with a Wellcome Trust People Award, the project was a landmark in science and art collaborations and an example of how an artist and scientist can combine to create devices with a direct clinical/patient benefit.

Since creating his face corsets, Paddy’s facial garments have found an entirely new audience in the fashion industry. He has created face corsets and garments inspired for Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Noomi Rapace, shot by fashion photographers including Nick Knight, Rankin and Tim Walker. His work features regularly in fashion publications including Vogue, W Magazine, V Magazine and Garage Magazine and can be seen at  www.patrickianhartley.com.

Collection images:

Three major bodies of work titled Bioglass Implants and Face Corsets, Project Facade, and Papaver Rhoeas, each funded by The Wellcome Trust, have emerged as a result of Paddy and Ian's collaborations over the past 15 years and have been exhibited at major international museums and institutions.

Project Facade, 2003–7

Project Facade, funded by a Wellcome Trust Large Arts Award, is widely considered a landmark science and art collaborative project, interpreting and combining elements of surgical, social, genealogical and military history with a contemporary art response.

Invited to Guy’s Hospital by Ian to observe facial surgeries as part of their Bioglass Implant project, Paddy became motivated to research and interpret the untold stories of the development of this unique surgery, specifically the WWI servicemen who were treated by pioneering facial surgeon Sir Harold Gillies for horrific facial injuries. 

Coupled with a desire to bring greater acknowledgment and understanding of the surgery devised by Gillies and the fortitude of those undergoing radical facial reconstruction, Paddy drew inspiration from his research at the Gillies Archives and the expert knowledge of its curator, Dr Andrew Bamji, in order to interpret the lives and experiences of 10 servicemen treated by Sir Harold Gillies. Working with vintage uniforms, digital embroidery and appliqué, Paddy created unique fabric artworks illustrating the dynamic surgery the servicemen underwent, incorporating digital embroideries of research gathered from their original records and contributions of memories from the families of the men Paddy traced.

More information about the 10 servicemen and the work inspired by each of their stories can be found on Paddy's  website.

The work premiered in an exhibition at the National Army Museum in London titled Faces of Battle, co-curated by Paddy, which presented the entire body of work alongside original Gillies Archives material. The exhibition told the story of the foundation of the plastic surgery unit at Sidcup by Gillies and many of the pioneering techniques and equipment devised by the team of surgeons, medics, technicians and artists based at the unit during the war years.

Regarding the project and its resulting exhibition, Paddy commented: ‘Our focus lay in curating an exhibition which depicted honestly and devoid of a sensationalist approach, the uncensored images illustrating reality of facial injury in war, and in a way in which young people could engage with challenging imagery in an educational, informative and sensitive context.’

This work has continued to be exhibited and published internationally and is in the permanent collections of a number of national museums and galleries. Researching and interpreting the stories of Gillies' WWI patients continues to be at the core of Paddy’s artistic and research practice.

Three major bodies of work titled Bioglass Implants and Face Corsets, Project Facade, and Papaver Rhoeas, each funded by The Wellcome Trust, have emerged as a result of Paddy and Ian's collaborations over the past 15 years and have been exhibited at major international museums and institutions.

Papaver Roheas, 2014–16

Concerns pertaining to the nature of remembrance, the culture of remembrance and the current phenomena of increasing acts of public memorialisation, often politically charged, inspired the creation of Papaver Rhoeas, funded by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award. For this project, Paddy researched and explored the symbolic significance of the poppy to the WWI and the act of public remembrance. He created poppies assembled almost entirely of lamb’s heart tissue and horsehair and presented them as a pathological learning tool in specially created specimen jars. These works were created to be read in a number of ways, either as a critique of memorialisation culture, or as a memorial in and of themselves.

Paddy was inspired to create work which represented both elements of sacrifice and metaphoric passing of memory, represented in the symbolic use of lambs' heart tissue and the gradual disintegration of the work. The project posed an enormous challenge, both in terms of the technical aspect of the build and needing to prepare the tissue so that it behaves in a very specific way. Paddy and Ian worked in partnership with Mr William Edwards, Curator of the  Gordon Museum of Pathology and  Professor Malcolm Logan, Professor of Regenerative Biology, whose respective expertise in tissue preparation and tissue clearing techniques were a vital contribution to the making of the work.

Presenting the work as a pathological specimen in custom-made glass vessels, whose form echoed both the specimen jar and a WWI artillery shell case, added additional layers of meaning and context to the work. A pathological specimen is, by definition, a sample of human tissue, an organ, limb or other body part which is diseased or malformed and is, in many cases, used as a learning tool in diagnosis. It is, in itself, a memorial to the ailment which afflicted the host/human from which it came and in many instances, was the reason behind the death of the individual. The same could be said of the poppy and its symbolism, cemented by the use of biological tissue in its making.

More information about the project is available on Paddy's  website.

Papaver Rhoeas at Museum of the Order of St John, London, 2015

Individual Papaver Rhoeas sculptures were exhibited simultaneously across 11 central London venues in November 2015 and will be exhibited as a complete group at The Lowry, Salford in 2017. A companion film illustrating the build process was also commissioned, which can be watched on Paddy's website  here.

Film still from Papaver Rhoeas Biotissue Sculpture by Paddy Hartley, film direction and edit by Raquel Couceiro and Tod Ivanov

Originally from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire,   Paddy Hartley lives and works in London and is based in the Thompson Laboratories in the Dental Institute at King's. He is a graduate of the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff with a Master's Degree in Sculpture and Ceramics.

His work exhibits at venues throughout the UK, Europe, the USA and Australia and his work has been acquired for the permanent collections of The Wellcome Collection London; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Norway and the National Army Museum London.

He is a regular guest speaker on his practice at universities and arts venues across the UK and additionally throughout the EU, Australia and the USA. Most notably he has presented at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; KODE, Bergen; The Science Museum, London; The Wellcome Trust and Museum of Arts and Design, New York.