Field Notes from the Heart’s Frontier // Moira Jeffrey

This time last year Deep in the Heart of Your Brain* had been open for a couple of weeks and the excellent reviews for the exhibition had started come in. Roll on one year and the artist Jacqueline Donachie, along with the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, has won the inaugural Freelands Award and is currently making new work for the exhibition in Edinburgh later this year; Glasgow Museums now has a capsule collection of her works acquired for the City with the support of the National Fund for Acquisitions; over 40,000 visitors attended the exhibition; and 2105 people attended 52 events, talks and workshops as part of the public programme.
The Deep in the Heart of Your Brain symposium** was a significant aspect of the public programme. It was exciting to programme in response to the exhibition and be a part of the amazing discussions that happened that day. We were delighted when Moira Jeffrey agreed to write a response to the symposium and are now even more delighted to be able to publish it online here. Field Notes from the Heart’s Frontier.
GoMA are very grateful to Moira for her wonderfully considered response to the day and her enthusiasm for taking on a very open brief! We would also like to thank Jacqueline Donachie for feedback, Angelo Nese for copy editing and Kirsty McBride for a fantastic job on the design.
*Deep in the Heart of Your Brain, 20 May–13 November 2016, Gallery 4, Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Glasgow, the symposium and Field Notes from the Heart’s Frontier were commissioned by Glasgow Museums with support from a Wellcome Trust Arts Award. Jacqueline Donachie also re-ceived support to work with GoMA from the National Lottery through the Creative Scotland Open Project Fund.
**The Deep in the Heart of Your Brain symposium was held at Platform, Glasgow on November 4, 2016, to develop the themes of Jacqueline Donachie’s exhibition of the same name at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow. The symposium was co-produced by Katie Bruce and Jacqueline Donachie and chaired by Alison Stirling, Projects Director, Artlink, Edinburgh. Its aims were to bring artists, institutions, academics and interested individuals together to dis-cuss care, bravery, lived experience, autoethnography and expert cultures in relation to the ethics and practice of knowledge exchange/public engagement in the art/medical research field.
The contributions were:
Jacqueline Donachie, Artist. Illuminating Loss
Karen Guthrie, Artist and filmmaker. The Closer We Get
Sarah Cunningham-Burley, Professor of Medical and Family Sociology, Assistant Principal, Research-led learning and Dean of Molecular, Genetic and Population Health Sciences in the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, University of Edinburgh. Making the private public: lived experience of health and illness.
Jason E. Bowman, Artist with a curatorial practice, writer, researcher and educator. MFA: Fine Art Programme Leader at the Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. Curating as Care Making