Lissa Rankin, who is a physician, as well as an artist, is currently looking for volunteers for The Woman Inside Project. She began this project several years ago, after she had to tell a woman her breast biopsy returned positive for cancer. The woman lamented what would happen to her figure and how this would affect her relationships and self-image. Lissa worked with her to focus on who she was on the inside, finding her value within. Since then, she has been making plaster casts of the torsoes of breast cancer survivors, then interviewing these woman about how they see themselves on the inside. An installation of painted casts, along with their stories, will be exhibited in October 2010 in Boston and in October 2011 in Galveston, in conjunction with breast cancer awareness month. If you or anyone you know would be interested in participating and is within traveling distance of the Monterey peninsula, please register your information and express your interest in the Guest Book.

Lissa Rankin's Thoughts on The Woman Inside Project:

 “It’s what’s on the inside that counts.”  We’ve all heard the cliché, so it loses its oomph.  But it’s true nonetheless, and I still say it to women who are diagnosed with breast cancer.  As an OB/GYN physician, I started asking my breast cancer patients to describe what that would look like on the inside, and the stories they told captivated me.  Too often we focus on the loss that accompanies breast cancer.  As a society, we deeply value breasts.  As objects of sexuality, femininity, or in the case of implants — wealth.  But why are we not spending more time valuing who we are as humans, as soulful, thinking, creating beings?  When a woman loses her breasts, she must face the loss of something society values as dear.  Hopefully, her inner strength, the patchwork quilt of her psyche, remains uncut, or in many cases, even strengthened.  During the course of my eight years of practice in Southern California, where seemingly everyone values beauty over depth, I became conscious of how many of my patients have lost touch with who they were inside. Therefore, a surgery such as a mastectomy can make them believe they have lost everything. I sought to inspire my patients to nurture their inner landscape, especially those who survived breast cancer and other prominent physical losses.

As an OB/GYN, artist, and writer, I discovered that I possess a unique skill set that makes me well suited for the project I embarked on three years ago, the one I call The Woman Inside.  For this project, I began by asking my patients who were breast cancer survivors if I might cast their torsos with plaster, the kind we doctors use to cast fractures.  During the hour-long casting sessions, where I applied layers of warm plaster to their disfigured chests, I interviewed these women about their breast cancer.  While their charts reflected the details — the stage, the type of treatment, how it was diagnosed — I realized that I had rarely bothered to take the time to ask how it felt, how their partners handled it, and what challenges they had experienced.  When I had completed the session, I held up the cast and said, “This is what your body looks like, but I want to know who you are in the inside.”

Everyone handles the breast cancer diagnosis differently, I’ve learned.  One patient, Pam, was adopted and knew nothing about her family history until her adoptive mother died and her biological sister called with bad news.  Apparently, Pam’s biological mother, aunt, and grandmother had all died very young from breast cancer.  Her sister thought she should know. On top of reeling from the fact that she lost two mothers at once, Pam was faced with a high likelihood that she would develop breast cancer.

A lesbian with a supportive partner who agreed with her decision, Pam elected to undergo prophylactic bilateral mastectomy.  When I asked her if she was happy about her decision, she pointed to her chest and said, “All they ever did was hurt before I got my period.”  She views her flat, unreconstructed chest with ambivalence.  Her girlfriend says that her health is more important than her figure.  When I asked her if she was interested in participating in my project, she was proud to show off her body. 

Jillie Bo, on the other hand, was reluctant when I approached her about having her chest cast.  She unbuttoned her shirt and showed me her breasts.  “I don’t want to discourage women who have recently been diagnosed with breast cancer,” she said.  I’ve been her doctor for 7 years and didn’t meet her until her treatment was completed.  She had a small, stage 1 tumor in her left breast and decided to undergo radiation.  She says the number of choices was overwhelming. At a time when she was worried about survival, she was trying to decide what to do. She didn’t realize at the time that a side effect of the radiation would result in a dramatic difference between the sizes of her breasts.  “It keeps getting worse,” she told me.  “It’s been almost ten years, and every year this breast seems a little bit smaller.  I wonder if it will just disappear one day.”  She saw a plastic surgeon, hoping to have an implant placed in the smaller breast, but she was told that the scarring from the radiation would make this impossible.  She’s considering having reconstruction with a tram flap, but she’s not sure it’s worth it.  I told her that she looked beautiful, and that I thought she would be an inspiration to any recently diagnosed breast cancer patient.  Now, 10 years down the road, with her inner beauty intact, she has an amazing attitude, and just a small difference in how she looks from the outside.

These women were my patients, and I was embarrassed to realize that I had never before asked them these questions.  I had made assumptions that were untrue, and there were amazing things I hadn’t known.  I was in awe.  Originally, I intended to use the interviews to inform how I would paint the casts. Others have compared encaustic (paint made from pigmented beeswax) to human skin, referring to the sensuous, tactile nature of the medium.  As the medium I routinely paint with, it seemed the perfect substance for finishing the casts.  I began to ponder what it would look like if we wore our lives upon our skin.  Rather than simply being judged by our outside appearance, we could be understood better by how we chose to embellish our exo-skeletal canvas.  Unlike our physical appearance, which is mostly genetic and only minimally reflects who we are, our skin could be painted with our experiences.   Like the character in playwright Jane Martin’s “Marks,” who tattoos her body to reflect pivotal moments in her life, perhaps I could cast women’s bodies and let their encaustic skin cover their physical form to reflect their inner lives.  The focus, if I could do it right, would be less on the figure, and more on the story of the woman herself.   Maybe one would have a cross on it, while another would have a Dr. Seuss character, and yet another would have a vintage car.

But that didn’t quite feel right.  Too kitschy, too diminishing of the depth of character these women displayed in their interviews.  So I decided to paint their casts with mostly white encaustic paint to allow the sculptures to speak for themselves.  And I decided, instead, that I would write their stories, which would hang beside the painted sculpture, as a foil to the outward likeness.  Between the two, viewers would more deeply know each woman, not just by the choices they made in whether or not to reconstruct their breasts, but in how they revealed themselves to me during the interview.

The first few women I cast relayed back to me that the process was deeply healing for them.  Not just in the telling of the story or the exposing of their bodies, but in the process of being touched and wrapped in something warm and comforting, with all the attention focused on them.  One likened the experience to a spa treatment mixed with a therapy session.  I had bought fluffy robes and fancy shampoos and soaps for the women, since they were covered with plaster and goo by the time the casting was done, and I wanted them to feel special, nurtured.  When I heard the word “spa treatment,” I changed my process a bit to make it more so; I brewed herbal tea and invited the women to get undressed for a soak in my hot tub before the session, and I mixed lavender oil into the warm water I used for the casting.  If only I could afford to hire a massage therapist to take over once I was done!

Since that time, I have completed nine casts.  The first five I did in San Diego were all patients of mine.  But a year ago, I moved to Monterey and have been pursuing my art and writing full time, which left me without easy access to breast cancer survivors.  But word travels fast.  Lately, women have been coming to me, referred by each other and by a woman who works with the Susan G. Komen Foundation in San Francisco.

I now have two gallery exhibitions scheduled — one at Lanoue Fine Art in Boston, MA and the other at the Buchanan Gallery in Galveston, TX.  Both hope to exhibit the project in October (one in 2010, the other 2011), since October is breast cancer awareness month, and both hope to do so in conjunction with a museum or hospital, maybe Harvard’s museum or at MD Anderson.  I will be sending out proposals shortly to museums, and I hope to make the exhibition a traveling one.  Ultimately, I will need to cast at least thirty women, and I am looking for women with unique stories to tell, more so than pretty people to sculpt.  One woman drove six hours to my house for a casting to celebrate completing her treatment.  She saw the casting as a sort of bookend to what was a horrible process for her.  In celebrating her wholeness and inner beauty, I believe we healed an open wound she had been wishing to close.

With this project, I am attempting to achieve a very bold goal — to not only draw attention to the issue of breast cancer, but to also honor and celebrate the women whose lives have touched me.  I would love it if this project grew into something even bigger.  One goal is to cast women at breast cancer retreats, such as those held at Commonweal in Marin County by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, author of Kitchen Table Wisdom, (www.commonweal.org).  I could create the casts and help the women paint their own casts to reflect who they are on the inside.  Imagine what healing art therapy that might be!  Oh my goodness, my spine is tingling just thinking about it.  Their own hand-painted casts could be a whole other spin-off exhibition.  I imagine the energy behind something like that, and see a world where women celebrate their lives and bodies in unique ways, and invite others to consider their health.

But I digress.

I must admit, I find this whole process daunting.  While finding volunteers to participate will not be difficult, who am I to try to find a way to express a woman’s inner beauty?  How will I know if I’ve done it right? It’s a big task, celebrating the woman inside, but I’m up for the challenge.

Originally I planned to incorporate literal imagery, based on my interviews with the women, but in the end, I opted to leave the figures unadorned, letting their words speak for themselves, filling in the gaps of what lies inside.  Here's an example: