Picture Your Poisons is an intimate portrait of a cancer treatment journey and will be featured in the Visual Arts Scotland centenary exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, free and open to the public 17 February to 13 March 2024.
One in two people will be affected by cancer during their lifetimes, including one in five women with breast cancer. The glass casts featured in Picture Your Poisons ground viewers in the real-world material origins of systemic anti-cancer treatments through the specific lens of one patient’s course of treatment. By materialising each treatment, the casts allow viewers to explore data which is more usually presented in an abstract, clinical context through a striking visual medium that elicits an emotional as well as a cognitive response. The artwork encourages the viewer to explore aspects of the patient experience relating to bodily autonomy, selfhood, and dis/empowerment in medical contexts by confronting them with the disembodied partial body casts of the affected breast.
A glass cast representing pembrolizumab, one of Caitlin’s systemic anti-cancer treatments. (c) Caitlin McDonald, used with permission.
The difference between medicine and poison is largely one of dosage. Substances which in one context are deadly (and indeed, used as weapons) are also life-saving. Picture Your Poisons explores this relationship using glass, a substance of many dualities: brittle yet strong, transparent or opaque, malleable yet firm. Glass is forged in a transformative process of great stresses on the raw materials, and similarly, cancer survivors endure treatments which radically transform their bodies in order to survive.
Creative Informatics research associates Inge Panneels and Caitlin McDonald joined forces to create this striking visual display based on Caitlin’s own experiences with cancer treatment throughout 2023. Caitlin’s inherent curiosity about the origins and functionality of her own treatment and Inge’s expertise in glassmaking facilitated a collaboration resulting in a unique new artwork. Over the course of six months, Inge and Caitlin worked together in Inge’s studio in Lilliesleaf to create six glass casts representing visual references to the substances and processes forming Caitlin’s treatments: yew bark, platinum and carbon, Tuscan red soil bacteria, mustard gas, radiation, surgical tools, and modified mice proteins.
Inge’s prior glass works have been featured in the Museum of Liverpool, Ebeltoft Glass Museum, Mercator Museum, National Glass Centre, and more. Caitlin’s prior work with data-driven memoir includes Pelican Stairs, a multimedia project using AI to generate new images based on a set of personal snapshots taken during the period of covid restrictions from March to September 2020.
Picture Your Poisons sits in the context of Creative Informatics’s portfolio of artistic projects that aim to make scientific and medical data more accessible and impactful to the general public, such as Andrew Brooks’s FND Stories, which shares the stories and lived experiences of those diagnosed with the neurological condition Functional Neurological Disorder (FND).
