Wound Care

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Cindy Stelmackowich, “Wound Care Wrapped Series,” 2016-2019

paper, gauze bandages, cotton, Pyrex glassware, steel, tile, dissection instrument, enamel medical dish and vintage medical table, 30” x 26” x 42” (photo by David Barbour)

Chunks of severed legs, feet and some other, less identifiable, body parts fill the blindingly white room, a macabre clinic of sorts, at Enriched Bread Artists, an old bakery in Ottawa that houses almost two dozen artists’ studios.

The body parts were created by Cindy Stelmackowich, a Saskatchewan artist transplanted to Ottawa, in a spacious studio filled with the kind of bric-a-brac that would surely make Dr. Victor Frankenstein drool with envy.

Body parts are displayed on antique medical trays and tables. A transparent, barrel-like container holds scores of plaster casts for dentures. A shelf features an odd assortment of beakers and test tubes. Nearby, on a large table stacked with first aid manuals, is a box of sharp, shiny objects once used by physicians to poke and prod.

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Cindy Stelmackowich, “Wound Care Operating Specimen,” 2017

vintage medical operating room stand, paper, gauze bandage, stainless medical tray and plastic tubing, 28” x 20” x 20” (photo by David Barbour)

Some of these objets de médecine are being repurposed into objets d’art and will be transported to the Estevan Art Gallery and Museum in southeast Saskatchewan for Stelmackowich’s solo exhibition, Wound Care, from Jan. 29 to April 2. 

Stelmackowich is determined to create just the right medical environment for the exhibition. The stars of the show are the body parts, far less horrific than one might assume. There’s a certain delicacy to them. Call them “tragically beautiful.” 

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Cindy Stelmackowich, “Wound Care Wrapped,” 2017

paper and gauze bandages, detail (photo by David Barbour)

We see a cross-section of the body parts, as if Dr. Frankenstein had, for example, removed a half-metre-long chunk of thigh. The outer layer might be a sturdy cotton bandage, a plaster cast or an antique splint. The thigh’s interior is made from rolled-up pages from old medical journals. Pages edged in red, when rolled and poking out of the covering, resemble muscle. Rolled white pages make dandy bones. Yellow-edged pages suggest fat.

These body parts are not intended to frighten (well, maybe a tiny bit). Instead, they are meant to invoke caring, the kind of caring bestowed on wounds by doctors, nurses and other medical personnel, the kind of caring the heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic are giving patients.

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Cindy Stelmackowich, “Life and Limb I & II,” 2020

vintage wood and metal WWI medical splints, mannequin parts, plastic medical models, yarn, wax and kinesiology tape, installation view (photo by David Barbour)

Some suspended body parts seem to bleed – the illusion is created with long, fuzzy ropes of red fabric that descend to the floor and then spool in concentric circles. These sculptural objects are no more threatening than a sleeping kitten. 

Stelmackowich has been creating medically themed art for decades. She traces her fascination with it back to her high school days in Melville, Sask., where her interests constantly veered between science and art. That dichotomy continued during university, finally uniting in a career of macabre, but aesthetically dazzling, medically-themed art. 

Her doctorate was on heritage medical journals, the kind filled with illustrations of Victorian ladies whose chest walls or abdomens had been opened like a cupboard to reveal their organs. Stelmackowich has digitally altered some illustrations to include scenes of carnage, such as fires and shipwrecks, inside their innards. The results are visual poems akin to the writing of Edgar Allan Poe.

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Cindy Stelmackowich, “Wound Care Calfed,” 2018

mannequin part, paper and medical footstool, 24” x 20” x 14” (photo by David Barbour)

Brian Foss, an art historian who has worked with Stelmackowich at Carleton University in Ottawa, sees her work as evolving from the Renaissance, when artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo physically explored the inner workings of the body in order to give more life to their images.

Stelmackowich wants to demystify human anatomy and make us a little more comfortable in our own skin, through appreciating the aesthetics of the body, inside and out. But she also wants to entertain us and even deliver a few shivers, as if we’ve been momentarily caressed by the hand of a corpse.

And just in case the coronavirus pandemic temporarily closes the Estevan gallery, videos are being prepared, allowing Stelmackowich to exhibit and talk about her work online. ■ 

Cindy Stelmackowich, Wound Care, at the Estevan Art Gallery and Museum in Saskatchewan from Jan. 29 to April 2, 2021. 

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