Oron Catts is an Australian artist and researcher currently residing in

Perth Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia. It is the fourth most populous city in Australia and Oceania, with a population of 2.1 million (80% of the state) living in Greater Perth in 2020. Perth is ...

, Western Australia where he has been employed at the

University of Western Australia The University of Western Australia (UWA) is a public research university in the Australian state of Western Australia. The university's main campus is in Perth, the state capital, with a secondary campus in Albany, Western Australia, Albany an ...

since 1996. He works as an artistic director of SymbioticA, which he also co-founded. Together with Ionat Zurr he founded the Tissue Culture & Art Project. From 2000–2001 he was a Research Fellow at the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Harvard Medical School. He has also worked with numerous other bio-medical laboratories in several different countries.

Works

Victimless Leather – a prototype of a stitch-less jacket, grown from cell cultures into a layer of tissue supported by a coat shaped polymer layer. This is a sub-project of the Tissue Culture & Art Project where the artists are growing a leather jacket without killing any animals. Growing the victimless leather problematizes the concept of garment by making it semi-living. This artistic grown garment is intended to confront people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protective and aesthetic reasons and confronts notions of relationships with manipulated living systems. Pig Wings Project with Ionat Zurr and Guy Ben-Ary was developed in 2000-2001 during a residency in the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory in Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. The work used tissue engineering and stem cell technologies in order to grow pig bone tissue in the shape of these three sets of wings. The Pig Wings Project presents the first ever wing-shaped objects grown using living pig tissue. This absurd work presents ethical questions regarding a near future where semi-living objects (objects which are partly alive and partly constructed) exist together with philosophical concepts around inter-species organ transplantation. Along with the Center for Genomic Gastronomy he has hosted a live cooking show called Art Meat Flesh from 2012-2019. Art Meat Flesh has featured research scientist

Mark Post Marcus Johannes "Mark" Post (born 20 July 1957) is a Dutch pharmacologist who is Professor of Vascular Physiology at Maastricht University and (until 2010) Professor of Angiogenesis in Tissue Engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology. ...

and other scientists and philosophers tasting and debating the future of protein in the kitchen.

References

External links

Oron Catts on the SymbioticA website

The Tissue Culture and Art Project

The Icon 20/20 Designers: Oron Catts/Ionat Zurr
{{DEFAULTSORT:Catts, Oron 1967 births Living people Australian conceptual artists BioArtists New media artists