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Press
Posted on Tue, Dec. 02, 2008 From Venus de Milo to Takashi Murakami's Hirospan, human breasts have long inspired art. Mary Ellen Scherl takes the classic sculpting tradition of the bust and turns it into a 21st century public health statement with her Mamorial project. For the project, which will be exhibited at the Bridge Art Fair at Miami Beach's Catalina Hotel this week as part of Art Basel, the Miami native makes life casts in flesh-colored resin of the chests of people with breast cancer. The casts are then placed on black silhouettes of figures going about their days: doing yoga, sweeping, shopping. These are torsos rippled with scars, busts without breasts -- at once disturbing and mesmerizingly beautiful. ''I think when you see a lot of them, the scope of it is just incredible,'' says Susie Firestone of Doral, one of Scherl's earliest casts, and her sister-in-law. ``You can't really explain it. You just stand there and you look at them, there's not one alike. You can see what people went through. And she's done it in such a tasteful way. What you're seeing is a room of deformed breasts, but that's not what you're seeing. It's a way of getting out there what this disease has done.'' Promoting public awareness of the widespread ravages of breast cancer was precisely Scherl's goal when she conceived Mamorial: 1 in 8 about six years ago. The former advertising art director had already been creating art that tussled with issues of body image. Her sculptures of an obese woman questioned concepts of beauty and well-being. That project had a direct impact on at least one person: The model, who was ''really ailing,'' Scherl says, wound up losing 200 pounds. ''She was going to openings where other people saw beauty and dignity in her, so she decided she could see it in herself,'' the sculptor says. Scherl began to think of other ways art could have a healing effect. After showing at an exhibition that raised money for cancer organizations, she got the vision for Mamorial. ``By the time I got home I was shaking. I knew I had a very powerful concept.'' Making the mamorials is a two-step process. First, a rubber mold of the chest is made. Early in the project, Scherl put together kits for making these molds and sent them to 50 women. Now she does the molds herself. The sculptor then uses the molds to make the life casts, adding tint to capture skin tones. Every wrinkle, mole, and hair comes out in the cast. CLOSE TO HOME ''Certainly when a loved one gets threatened to that degree, it hits you in a profound way,'' she says. Fifteen years ago, Firestone was diagnosed with breast cancer. Scherl first called her when she had the idea for Mamorial. The artist wanted to know if she thought women would be willing to participate. Firestone said yes. ''Once you've been through it, once you've been through all the chemo and the radiation and the exams and surgery, vanity goes out the window,'' Firestone says. Indeed, Scherl, who lives in New Jersey and is president of the Sculptors Guild, says the reaction from patients and survivors -- including one male -- has been overwhelming. The problem is not finding models: ``Unfortunately there's no end to the number of people who would like to participate.'' One in eight American woman are diagnosed with breast cancer, thus the title of her work. Rather, the problem is finding donations to buy the supplies to make the casts. She has 250 molds of chests, 80 of which have been cast into resin. Mamorial is a nonprofit corporation; Scherl does not sell the pieces, but she is eagerly looking for donors. ''Mamorial is at the intersection of public health and public art,'' she says. Peggy Sherry has witnessed the healing effects of Mamorial. The director of Faces of Courage, camps for women and children with cancer and blood disorders in Tampa, watched as Scherl cast dozens of women of color one day at a Faces retreat. She wasn't sure if the women would welcome the invasion of their privacy, but their response was overwhelming. ''She is a very caring individual,'' Sherry says of Scherl. ``A lot of the times when the women had completed doing their mamorial, they were just elated. While she was doing it the women would tell their stories. Almost anyone who is willing to take the risk of baring their chest, their story spills out of them.'' Sherry herself was one of the models. ''I think people who are outside of the cancer world, we're used to talking about it and we're used to the battle scars,'' she says. ``But the whole other part of the world has no idea what a woman goes through when she's diagnosed with cancer. This is a great way of saying look, these women, in order to stay alive, are cutting off body parts, because this is a really deadly disease. If going to see or reading about the Mamorial causes one woman to get a mammogram, I think she's done her job.'' GET THE WORD OUT ''The pink ribbon, as powerful as it is, it's euphemistic,'' says Scherl. ``It's not what the disease is. It doesn't carry the profound impact of the trauma of it, the seriousness of it, that among us, one in eight women have this underneath their T-shirts and sweatshirts and ball gowns.''
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| Copyright ©2009 Mary Ellen Scherl |