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This Specimen Must Not Be Moved
Natasha Loydell

04/07/2025 - 13/07/2025

Concrete Block Gallery, Lauriston Gardens,
Edinburgh, EH3 9HH


To sit down, lie back, spread your legs – these acts exist in both the most intimate of spaces and inside the medical institution. Everything shifts and transforms in the white, blues and greens of GP surgeries and A&E corridors. The sterility of the hospital sits against the history of a practice as old as human society itself - part science, part magic. Natasha Loydell’s work suggests that institutions can have folklore. Relics and artefacts help tell a story, they bear witness to narratives and perspectives from those forced into the margins of history. As an artist with lived experience of disability, these narratives are at the forefront of Loydell’s practice. 

Votive Gallery is delighted to be presenting This Specimen Must Not be Moved at Concrete Block Gallery. It feels fitting to bring this work to Edinburgh, this gothic city steeped in anatomical history, macabre gravediggers and shifty doctors. Whilst researching in Italy across various medical and waxwork museums, Loydell became interested in medical models and the kinds of bodies they represent. In the centre of the space lies a box. A dissection table, a relic of old anatomy theatres. A ghostly image of a wax model – its classical beauty upset by a stomach splayed open.

When we look at art, we understand how important this act of looking and its power is. The gaze is a vital tool for investigating biases and the potential violence of depiction. Natasha Loydell’s show This Specimen Must Not be Moved brings to the fore the bizarre and sinister medical gaze and asks the viewer to pay attention to how it can transform bodies and embodied experience.

Text by Maxime Swift.

Thank you to Andrew Brooks of Concrete Block Gallery.