Toronto Life:
I started sculpting in 1991, working only with natural materials. My studio housed a collection of dead things.
I spent up to 12 hours a day grinding and sanding the shells to fit into the shape of Adam’s body.
After a few months working on Adam, I began to feel unwell. I was agitated all of the time. I had constant headaches, and I vomited often, sometimes a few times a day. I visited a never-ending assortment of specialists—neurologists, rheumatologists, endocrinologists—hoping to figure out what was wrong with me. When they asked me if I worked with anything toxic, I said no, that I only used natural materials.
The symptoms worsened.
What an awful, terrible story. My heart goes out to this artist.
Unfortunately, this is all too common. A lot of early fiberglass artists in the late 60s died of cancer. It was a short lived movement. Before that, Lead White pigment was a common toxic hazard. I was astonished when my painting professor insisted we would all prepare at least one canvas with Lead White. But that is not even close to the most hazardous artist’s materials I handle on a routine basis. It’s an occupational hazard.
“I only used natural materials…” This is pretty much entirely her doctor’s fault…lead and arsenic ARE natural materials, and as environmental toxins are widely prevalent in the environment.
Artists DO commonly present with toxic reactions from materials, and it should have been investigated.
They should have asked “What natural materials?”. There were several cases of anthrax in NYC some years back, traced to imported animal hides used to make drums.
A friends mother, many many many years ago was a toxicologist for the state, and one of her cases was about some migrant workers who died, allegedly after exposure to pesticides.
Turned out to be some greens they’d harvested to add to their dinner, it turned out to be a tobacco relative, not the plant they thought it was; they’d died of nicotine poisoning from this ‘natural’ material.
There’s a maxim in medicine “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras” as a caution against leaping to diagnostic conclusions…but when you’ve ruled out the presence of horses, something’s making the hoofbeats…
Sadly, I also suspect part of the issuet was the misogyny that to this day permeates the medical profession: Women’s complaints are all ‘in their heads’ .
(I had a friend who spent YEARS in agony and ended up sterile because her doctors thought her pain every period was ‘in her head’.
No, it was endometriosis, and very nearly killed her.)
Yeah, this is tragic but some really basic stuff was missed. She started having symptoms after working with this stuff… gee, connection? And why didn’t they test her blood much sooner? it’s sad that she’s in such poor health now, though.
Grinding just about anything poses a health risk. I agree much was missed, but the really telling situation was described subsequent to cleaning the air handling system, when symptoms increased dramatically.
When I did glass-blowing in college, in the mid-80s, some of the more advanced blowers were doing stuff like pour powders of heavy metals down the pipe, to get really cool colors and patterns. Mind you it was like pour mercury dust, and then put their mouths over where they had just pour the stuff. Even then I knew that probably wasn’t a recipe for success in life. Really cool art, that people will likely enjoy after the artists grisly and premature death.
The guy who I took the classes with was edgy in his own particular way. He rolled shards of stained glass into his pieces. Cool milky color effect, but with on little problem. When the pieces cooled, the two different types of glass cooled at different rates and create an internal torsion that made them susceptible to exploding when the barometric pressure randomly changed. The professor was like “Cool, you get an A, now get them the hell out of here!”. That artist is now a renown Maker.