Pig bladders have for centuries been used in the manufacturing of sports equipment. Light, solid, and stretchable, they made perfect airtight membranes inside the first footballs. Artist John O'Shea is now going back to this traditional method, fusing it with cutting-edge biotechnology to create the first football made with a pig bladder entirely grown in a lab.
Commissioned by the Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival and funded by the Wellcome Trust, "Pigs Bladder Football" was inspired by the first successful transplant of a bioengineered organ, a urinary bladder, in 2006. O'Shea has been an artist-in-residence at Liverpool University's Clinical Engineering Unit for the last year. He has worked in close collaboration with Professor John Hunt and Theun Van Veen to devise his own scientific protocol, experimenting with living animal cells collected from abattoir waste.
In this Olympic period, O'Shea's challenge poignantly resonates with the heated debates around human enhancement in sports. The project is still ongoing, but if successful, the pig bladder football will be presented together with documentation of its fabrication process in an exhibition at Manchester's CUBE next month, as part of the AND Festival.
"Pigs Bladder Football," August 30-September 7, 2012, CUBE (Centre for the Urban Built Environment), Manchester; Abandon Normal Devices Festival, August 29 – September 2, 2012, throughout Manchester, Liverpool, Lancashire, and Cumbria.
This article appears on ARTINFO UK.