These are my mom’s physical therapy positions that she’s doing to lessen the muscle tension around her operated breast. I used these as inspiration for some of my more recent pieces.

Finally finished this piece, here is a rough scan that I will be editing to make the color more accurate. Pretty happy with the color intensity of the woodburning and the over all way it turned out!

So its been a while since I last posted progress- we are on spring break and my mom is staying with me from Wisconsin! I really missed having her around, and it was great to see her for her birthday yesterday- she is 61 and cancer free! She showed me some more of the scars on her chest, and her physical therapy routine. I really didn’t realize how severe the muscle tightening on her mastectomy side would be. Radiation causes muscle shrinkage months after the treatment is completed. She has trouble raising her right arm above her head and gets shooting pains down that side of her abdomen. Additionally, and this is more of an aesthetic issue, her right breast is several cup sizes smaller than her right, with a big gash right through the middle. This really brings to light the misconceptions about lumpectomies- I’ve heard people comment things like, “Well its not like she lost a breast…” But the damage is still drastic. Because its only a “cosmetic” problem, insurance doesn’t cover reconstructive surgery. And surgeons are hesitant to work on the smaller breast, as it has already be irradiated and gone through surgery, and the sentinel lymph nodes a few inches over were removed. So her only option now would be to get a breast reduction for the left breast, and pay for it out of pocket.

The good news- really, really good news- is that she says she is feeling like herself more now. I promised my dad I would get her flowers; he does this every year on her birthday and their anniversary. So I snuck out and got a big bouquet, a lemon cupcake and her favorite champagne. That night my room mates and I surprised her and sang happy birthday over the cupcake with a candle in it, and popped the champaign at the end (messily). She laughed and laughed. Its so good to see her confident and enjoying herself again. And her hair cut is SO cute!! She has just enough to make a pixie cut, really short on the sides. I think she’s rocking it!

I haven’t been doing a lot of woodburning lately and to keep my hand from getting stiff I did a couple little panels with sea illustrations from the Natural History Museum. Each panel is 5 in by 3 in.

More sketches in colored pencil, soon to be transferred to wood! 

This week I am working on woodburning in my designs which I’ve planned using sketches on acetate to determine the layout. I have been sick for the last three weeks with a sinus infection that migrated to my chest so I’ve been super sick and haven’t made a ton of progress.

(I tried to rotate this image, and it indicates that it is rotated, and I even worked with Jess the TA on it to try to understand why this blog seemingly ignores commands at random, but to no avail! It continues to be very frustrating)

Last week we had a couple of rotating crits with different professors, and neither of them were very elucidating for me. We spent most of the time summarizing what our projects were (they were at the presentations last semester but I’m sure it is impossible to keep track of all the different students’ work). The most common response was “keep going”, which I suppose is a good sign, but more specific feedback would have been helpful.

Since last semester I have taken a profound interest in the neural pathways of the body. My mom has had lots of weird residual effects from chemotherapy, including shocks and tingling sensations from her shoulder (on the side where she had a partial mastectomy) down to her fingers. She is currently in physical therapy to treat soreness on that side, but the doctors say she will likely feel nerve effects for years to come.

Over the winter break my father (who is a professor of electrical engineering) and I created Lichtenburg Figures on wood panels in our basement. We took apart an old microwave and hooked up the transformer (power source, roughly 2000 volts) to power clips and shocked wood to create the figures below. (The images are kind of stretched from the scanner: better images to follow shortly). The wood was dampened with a mix of baking soda and water to increase conductivity, and sprayed periodically to prevent fires (when the burns meet and complete the circuit, the panel would burst into flames). The only downfall of this technique is that the baking soda seems to have stained the wood a yellowish color that I find unattractive. I will experiment with some fine grain sandpaper to see if I can remedy this without re-staining the wood.

I am now planning my woodburning illustrations on the shocked panels using acetate to plan where the sketches should be. Using this technique I can plan the layouts of my panels without damaging them incase I change my mind. More images to follow!

Last spring, as I was preparing for my final week of classes, I found out my mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer. (That’s us on the screen) I remember the phone call, when she first told me that during a routine mammogram the doctors had found a lump. She had already suffered through two bouts of skin cancer; once, before I was born, and then during spring of my junior year, she was diagnosed with basel cell carcinoma. So after going through all of this, I remember thinking there was no way my mom could be diagnosed with cancer again. She had already paid her dues, in my mind, and surely lightning wouldn’t strike twice. But they biopsied the lump in her breast and, sure enough, it was cancerous. Luckily they had found it early on, they assured us, which was exactly what they had said about the skin cancer. It seemed to me that the available treatments were pretty brutal no matter how early on it was caught, but I was grateful none the less that it hadn’t grown any larger unnoticed.

So over the summer, my mom had two surgeries; one was a lumpectomy, or “partial mastectomy”, of her breast, and another was the removal of a lymph node from under her arm on the same side to biopsy in case of lymphoma. My family had been planning a trip to China for over a year, and despite being in recovery my mom decided to come with us overseas just a few weeks after surgery. My father is a professor and was invited to tour the labs of various universities in China, and we were lucky enough to be able to come along. While he was on campuses, my mom and I visited Buddhist temples and prayed for her recovery. I was fascinated by the Guan-yin, or female guardian figures, I saw in various Chinese artifacts, and initially planned to do my thesis work on the significance of Goddess imagery in East Asian religions. However, when I returned to the states and my mom started chemotherapy, I found myself more and more drawn to her story. At my professor’s suggestion, I began keeping a diary of her progress, our phone calls, bits of conversations and sketches (which are the slides you see now). I found that my initial ideas about exploring femininity, sexuality and power in the context of Goddess archetypes became the subtext of my project, no longer explicitly a visual part of my work but a more nuanced way of expressing the same ideas. The daily frustrations I catalogued in my sketchbook seemed mundane at first, but eventually fueled a visual exploration I had not yet arrived at. To be honest, beginning the semester this was way difficult for me since I saw so many of my classmates working on concrete ideas they had finalized long ago. But I now think that my open-ended approach yielded much more intimate and unexpected work than I ever could have planned beforehand.

So as I was writing these journal entries I learned more and more about my Mom’s experiences; the side effects of chemotherapy treatments, her struggle with the loss of her hair and appetite, and the reactions of those around her. I found myself engrossed in her story and the more we talked the more I wanted to know. At first the sketches I was doing focused on my environment, and the context for many conversations I had with my mother during her treatment. But these images lacked a certain depth and permanence, so I decided to return to a medium I have loved for years, wood burning. For me the matte, flesh toned wood panels served as a perfect representation of the body, and I began researching old anatomy textbooks and medical illustrations. The lines drawn by dragging a hot knife across the board looked shaky and irritated, and reminded me of a surgeon’s scalpel. The burner leaves a small indents wherever it rests, giving each piece a unique engraved quality. As I was working, my mother’s pain served as a catalyst for my change in direction, and my project became much more focused on the physical and mental effects of cancer treatment. Unexpected symptoms like warped taste buds and blood infections were fascinating to me, and equally as interesting was my Mom’s reaction to them. Exhausted and with waning patience she nonetheless fought with optimism day after day. I would ask “How did radiation go?” and she would say “Great! Now I can glow in the dark!”. I recorded our conversations in my sketchbook and transcribed them on my illustrations, creating a tension between an intimate voice and clinical representations of the body that I thought was powerful. Next semester I hope to continue my work on these panels and display a collection of them accompanied by small risograph booklets to include the entire collection of illustrations that might not fit on a gallery wall. I’m also thinking about using audio clips of interviews and conversations and am open to your input.

In closing, I’d like to share my favorite line from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, which is incidentally where my mom got her favorite phrase:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never is, but always to be blessed:

The soul, uneasy and confined from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.