Melhorn-Boe, Lise. 2018. “ Found Image: Textures and Textiles in Teaching Toxicity.” In Canary Narratives: Visualizing Gender, Chronic Illness, and Exposure, created by Rachel Lee, Alexandra Apolloni, Molly Bloom, and Mehar Maju. In Visualizing Toxic Subjects Digital Exhibit, curated by James Adams and Kim Fortun. The Center for Ethnography. March.
Lise Melhorn-Boe, " Found Image: Textures and Textiles in Teaching Toxicity", contributed by Rachel Lee and Alexandra Apolloni, Center for Ethnography, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 13 May 2019, accessed 24 April 2024. http://www.centerforethnography.org/content/found-image-textures-and-textiles-teaching-toxicity
Critical Commentary
Substantive Caption
The early works of Canadian artist Lise Melhorn-Boe inquired into the thwarted, deferred, and transferred artistic desires of women. In Color Me Dutiful (1986), Melhorn-Boe collected stories elicited from women as to why they wear make-up, printing those desires and recollections on oval paper leaflets (i.e., faces) collected in a receptacle whose cover is a plaster cast of her own mienne. After becoming ill with breast cancer and, then, felled by exposure to mold, Melhorn-Boe returned to the oval leaflets with a new awareness of environmental toxins that had likely contributed to her own health. Toxic Face Book (2008) returns to the landscape of the face and lists the chemical ingredients of the many emollients and hues that women use regularly. The artist’s life history of exposures to heavy metals are also rendered via a pop-up book, No Safe Levels (2006), figuring a topography of rolling hills and peaks, the overall shape based on her body’s profile while lying sideways and inscribed with the heavy metals that turned up in her laboratory panel. In What’s for Dinner (2011), a textual homage and spin on Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, she prompts the picnic goer to unfold a series of meals that list the contaminants in food that contribute to total body burden. The large (40 inch) fold-out work, Body Map (2009), features a photograph of the artist’s post-mastectomy figure, with a personal and public environmental history inscribed across various body parts.
Design Statement
We selected this visualization because:
Melhorn-Boe’s “thick description” art, detailing encounters with toxicity, has been less quick to sell than earlier work. Though her table-top treasure boxes, origami-ed landscapes, and pop-up book/ quilt mashups cry out to be touched, they also record how we are contaminated and in constant contact with EDCs. The art provides an ethnographic encounter, making tactile the invisible chemicals that surround us. However, the lay public wishes to keep the knowledge about the risks of living in (post)industrial ecologies at a distance.
The visual art represents something soft that might offer solace against the ominous lists of chemicals/EDCs. Melhorn-Boe sews and folds stories of living in non-purity, in contaminated and disabled canary being into missives of tactile communion.