To me the design really represents how frustrated I was at the lack of information available about the lives of these women. Aside from a few key dates some of the women were completely lost to history.

The book that influenced me the most was called To the Ends of the Earth by Thomas Bonner. I was struck by his suggestion that these women could be lost to history. I wanted to bring their names into a new medium and introduce them to the modern world.

I knew right away I wanted to include their names in the work to make sure they would be known. The other thing I wanted was visual representations of all seven women.

From far away the work appears to be a shelf of hollow books made from string. At the time, there wasn’t much online about their lives [That has since changed]. I had just finished a few

When you change the scale of the work and view the women from below, the books become buildings and you’re standing on the street. The women appear perched in their windows, waiting for clients. Accepting money for services was frowned upon for most women of the time, but these women stood out from most women in society.

Up close, you see each women has her own unique qualities, irregularities, and imperfections. Everyone wants to present their best image, but convey much about the lives of real women in the 1860s and today.

From the side, the names of each of the women extend out from their figures drawing together through the eye of a distance needle holding them all together. Like most women of the time, these women could sew, it made them world class surgeons.

From the right perspective, a tiny needle becomes very threatening. By 1874, the social and political pushback against women as doctors reached a peak, forcing women home through threats or by enticing them with watered down women’s programs of their own, thereby lessening the threat to the traditional medical hierarchy across the globe for a while.