“While we may be flesh-coloured on top,” says artist Patricia Chauncey, “there's a whole lot more that's underneath us that is actually shockingly beautiful.”
Chauncey's textile art pieces vividly illustrate this idea. Some look like chunks of dinosaur hide, others like magnifications of animal cells or tissue samples. One looks like something you'd glimpse in an antismoking ad: a thick, textured mat of moist greys, browns and purples. All are potent and organic, like things excavated from the earth or the human body and exposed to daylight for the first time.
Chauncey has been interested in organic and biological subjects for a long time, having spent many childhood hours looking for dinosaur bones in the Alberta badlands. She has used medical imagery in her work for years, while doing art shows, designing and distressing costumes for the film industry, and raising a family in Vancouver.
Although she had been feeling sick for years, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer only last year. “By the time they found the tumour in my body it was the size of a grapefruit ... . I had a lymph node that was completely replaced by cancer. So, I moved instantly from not knowing I had cancer into metastatic cancer.” Fighting her cancer, she's come to incorporate her awareness of her body into her art.
“Since I've been diagnosed with cancer ... I've had the opportunity, very differently than most people who are healthy, to see what that looks like. I've seen what my cells look like, I know what my DNA is like, I know what my skeleton looks like. I've been living up in the library in the cancer clinic. People think I'm reading to find out if I can improve my situation ... . But what's amazing to me is the visuals of it. I'm absolutely fascinated by the beauty of cells, and by how magical the connection between body parts and everything is. ... [Cells] are like gardens, they're like little constellations. I mean they're just absolutely amazing. Sometimes the cells that are pretty are the ones that are sick.”
These are the images and ideas that Chauncey incorporates into her art. She works in destructive textiles, which involves “slashing, cutting, burning, melting and leaving [metal] in the yard to rust, and applying different kinds of materials so that the textile takes on a different form. You can start with a plain cotton and come out with something entirely different, or a plain white piece of polyester and have something that's very three dimensional and very carved-up, very mineral-like. It takes on completely different qualities.” Her work also includes embroidery, dyeing, printing and silkscreen techniques. She studied at Capilano College under Leslie Richmond, one of the world's foremost destructive textile artists.
Some of her work consists of memory pieces, such as Grandfather Story, with items from her grandfather's life embedded in wax. Others are political, such as Altered Gulf, with images of Middle East warfare printed on pieces of leather that were buried in her garden with rusted metal. In her art, artifacts and items are taken out of their usual contexts and put on display as in a museum, as a way of relaying history.
Her biological pieces also use display techniques as a means to storytelling. In her Material Witness show, for example, organic textiles were placed in jars and Petri dishes. Hive, made of cast paper and acrylics, is a honeycomb-like piece with tiny pictures of animal and plant cells in the hexagonal compartments.
Another work, Blood, Water, Salt, Rot is about the frailty of life and death. “All of those are very elemental,” says Chauncey. “All of them — blood, water, salt, rot — are absolutely necessary to what we need to live, but each one of them can be toxic. You can drown in water, salt can become poisonous. Blood itself, we've learned a lot about since HIV. Those kinds of things are both beautiful to me, but also quite terrifying. Those kinds of things are absolutely necessary. We require everything that may not be so pretty to survive. [But] those things can change. Our flesh can change. It can become something that can kill us.”
Not only has cancer killed 27 members of Chauncey's family, but her mother was prescribed the synthetic estrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES) when she was pregnant. This drug was subsequently found to increase the risk of cancer in both mothers and their children. “In an attempt to create the perfect pregnancy, they created these horrible cancers for women in the future, women who were born of DES,” Chauncey says.
In a way, Chauncey is a product of medical science, and it still affects her life through her cancer treatments. “One of the things about being in chemo is [that it] changed my cells.” She lifts up her hat, revealing the pale fuzz on her scalp. “My hair is just coming back in, and it's pure white. It was brown before, dark, dark blond. It'll come back in naturally curly. “[Medical science] can change your hair colour, how you look, what your skin texture is like,” she explains. “It's all really amazing to me.”
She sees her disease as “my body's attempt to clone itself. I have these cells that keep duplicating. There's something so incredibly fascinating and beautiful about [that].”
Even though it may kill her? “It could,” she says. “We'll see what happens.”
Peter Tupper Freelance journalist Vancouver, BC