Caitlin Berrigan is an interdisciplinary artist in tactile and edible sculpture, immersive installation, electronic media and interactive performance. Her pieces have been alternatively characterized as disturbing, sexy and even smelly. Invoking the history of science and pop culture, her works address the ruptures & confluences of the body's grotesque form, its medicalization, and many variations as object of desire. The results are quietly disturbing works of subtle humour & irony that speak to our violent and conflicted relationship to the body.

Berrigan is often inspired by materials that resemble or hyperbolize organic bodies. Yet the materials she employs "food, perishables, video, wax, plastics, rubbers, stains" possess a distinct odor, tactility or elastic property that triggers a sensual and primal experience in viewers that is equally important to the piece as its conceptual component.

"Viral Confections" (2006) are edible chocolates shaped into the molecular structure of the hepatitis C virus. Desire to eat the enticing chocolates is mixed with repulsion for the infectious virus. This unnerving dialectic has proved to be an exciting and approachable way to ignite discussion and create awareness about an extremely prevalent and underrepresented disease. "The Smelling Committee" (2006-07) is inspired by the olfactory bravado of the original group in 1891. This interactive smelling artwork is a goofy yet meaningful ecological awakening through the sensory exploration of our neighborhoods. In the intimate sculpture "The Whisper Opera" (2006), the electronic and the organic create an interface where human audiences relate to the cyborg in themselves through tactile, silicone casts of the negative space of the mouth that whisper and sing when held in the palm of the hand. The installation "La Specola: medical examination & archetypes of the vagina dentata" (2004) employs video narratives, surveillance cameras and a computerized, 3D interactive vagina to address the mingling of myth and medicine in gynecology. Jiggly, tactile latex sculptures and cloying beeswax panels position viewers bodies within the installation, provoking visceral responses to reveal our cultural conditioning to the abject, the pleasurable, and the taboo.

Her work has shown internationally at Storefront for Art & Architecture, Anthology Film Archives, L.A. Freewaves, SIGGRAPH, the Conflux Festival, Women in the Director's Chair, the Bent Festival at Eyebeam, Stuttgart New Media Festival and the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv among other venues and festivals. Berrigan is pursuing her Master's at M.I.T. and received her B.A. in art production and art history at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. A native of Northern California, she has been in Brooklyn after living in France and Massachusetts.

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