The inspiration

This is a work of continuous line art, built in VR, illustrating the interconnected lives of seven women struggling to become doctors in the 1860s. The work represents how lost the details of their lives are to history. All I could do was dream of finding secret diaries filled with their inner thoughts and feelings. Looking at the front you see a collection of hollow books, waiting to be filled with the details of their lives.

When you change the scale of the work, the books become buildings. You can stand on the street and look up at the women in their windows, waiting for clients. The women of The Zurich 7 stood out in public in a society that preferred women to remain at home. They earned money professionally, which to many Victorian period people, looked much like prostitution. Creating visual representations of each of the women was an important outcome to me. I’ve been unable to find images of all seven of and to tell their complex and interesting stories it seemed much easier to be able to tell them apart. The line art figures, with their unique qualities, irregularities, and imperfections, convey much about the lives of real women in the 1860s and today.

Their names are almost lost to the past, that’s why I wanted to include them in the piece. 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. Many of the women sewed for money at some point in their lives, an entire book was written about Maria’s sewing circle, but that is literally another story. It should surprise no one that women in the 1860s would make highly skilled surgeons, they started sewing as children.

When you look from a very distant scale, the work is only a needle and thread, but 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.

It wouldn’t matter, the next wave was already forming.