As part of the Scripps-Claremont McKenna College senior art exhibition, “Sight, Site, Insight,” Jessica Lanan ’06 displayed freestanding wood and fiberglass works representing cancer cells. The artist’s project, ‘Metastasis,’ joined the works of 13 other students as the culmination of study and practice of art at the colleges.
Jessica, who received the Scripps Fine Arts Foundation Award for her sculptures, explains her artistic process: “The forms were originally inspired by electron microscope photographs of breast cancer cells that I came across while doing research for a medical anthropology class. I modeled the basic structure after the physical appearance of the cells, but I exaggerated them and gave them monstrous proportions in the hopes of expressing some of the emotions that I associate with the illness experience of cancer.” Jessica intends to study medical illustration at the graduate level in order to learn more about the structure of the body and disease.