About the Film

This artist residency documentary film follows Susan Aldworth and Andrew Carnie over almost two years, as both artists worked alongside CANDO, Newcastle University’s project developing a light-based brain implant to treat epilepsy. The result, Illuminating the Self, showed as two concurrent exhibitions at Hatton Gallery and Vane in Newcastle in early 2020: Aldworth’s Out of the Blue and Carnie’s Blue Matter. This film follows both artists from early studio sketches through to the finished installations going up in the gallery.

The CANDO Project

CANDO stands for Controlling Abnormal Network Dynamics using Optogenetics, a combined gene therapy and brain implant intended to suppress seizure activity without damaging the surrounding brain function. As neuroscientist Fiona LeBeau explains in the film, the technology relies on making brain cells respond to light: a gene therapy makes the cells express an opsin, the same light-sensitive protein found in the eye, so that a brain implant can deliver light stimulation that silences abnormal activity as a seizure begins to build, ideally suppressing it before it takes hold. Andrew Jackson, who leads the project, describes Aldworth and Carnie’s role as responding to conversations they had with CANDO’s researchers and clinicians rather than illustrating the science directly, taking those themes in directions the team hadn’t anticipated.

An Artist Residency Two Years in the Making

Both artists spent time properly embedded with the CANDO team before either had a clear sense of what they would make. Aldworth describes gathering material without knowing how she would use it, from watching an epileptic patient’s EEG scan at St Thomas’ Hospital to looking through archive photographs of electrical brain activity she calls “unbelievably beautiful”. Carnie talks about working loosely from a blank page, letting drawings and half-formed ideas accumulate until something clicks, a process he compares to feeding a problem to his own brain and trusting, from past experience, that a solution will eventually surface. Neither artist claims to have known where the work was heading. As Aldworth puts it early in this artist residency documentary film: “It’s going to take a lot of work, a lot of people, a lot of experiments. I’m not even sure I can pull it off.”

Susan Aldworth: Out of the Blue

Aldworth’s installation grew into what she calls the most complicated piece she has made: around 100 items of Victorian clothing, each embroidered by a different person with a testimony from someone living with epilepsy. She settled on a precise inventory early on: forty petticoats, twenty night dresses, eight pairs of large knickers, five skirts, eleven shirts and blouses, two pairs of trousers and one apron, embroidered by first and second-year students at the Royal School of Needlework. She chose underwear and nightwear deliberately, since both are typically hidden from view, echoing what she describes as the stigma and secrecy that often surrounds epilepsy itself. Each garment hangs from a motor, and the motors’ differing speeds give the installation its own breathing rhythm, slow motors producing a low, mournful sound, faster ones closer to breath in and out, building toward a synchronised, seizure-like crescendo before falling still. When lit, the clothes turn from a hundred embroidered garments into what she calls “100 ghostly pieces of clothing”.

Andrew Carnie: Blue Matter

Carnie’s response took shape as a large-scale video piece, Blue Matter, projected across two layers of black voile onto a white screen, alongside a series of kinetic sculptures triggered by hidden sensors elsewhere in the gallery. The video grew out of drawings of neurons that Carnie found himself repeatedly returning to an image of trees, standing in for the branching structure of brain cells, drawn from the mistletoe-covered trees near his home in Winchester and reimagined as a kind of focal point for the epilepsy the CANDO implant is designed to treat. Elsewhere in the space, three modified lasers respond to hidden sensors, timed to lie dormant for long stretches before firing without warning, deliberately keeping visitors uncertain about when or where the work will respond to them. “Nobody knows quite where the sensors are that switch things on and off,” Carnie says, a small enactment of the CANDO implant’s own closed-loop relationship with the brain: sensing activity, then responding to it in turn.

A Complementary Response

Both artists describe the finished exhibition as a genuine collaboration with the CANDO team rather than an illustration of their research handed down after the fact. Fiona LeBeau notes how useful an outside, artistic perspective can be to scientists who spend most of their time immersed in technical detail, while Andrew Jackson points to the way Carnie’s interest in hybridity, in what happens to a sense of self when biology is altered from outside, mirrors the two-way, closed-loop relationship at the heart of the CANDO implant itself. LeBeau sums up why the two bodies of work sit so well together: Aldworth’s focus on the personal experience of living with epilepsy, and Carnie’s on the technology and its implications, complementing each other as two honest, distinct responses to the same research.

Filming a Two-Year Process

Documenting a project like this meant returning to two studios, at very different points in the artists’ process, over close to two years, rather than arriving once for a single, tidy shoot. Some visits caught nothing more than a sketch or an idea still being turned over out loud; others caught a piece failing to work, or the last few hours before an installation finally came together in the gallery. Filming an artist residency documentary film across that kind of timescale means accepting that most of what you shoot on any one day won’t end up defining the work, and trusting that the shape of the whole thing will only become clear once you can see the studio visits and the finished installations side by side.