Breast Cancer Art Project by Toby Jones

My mother died of metastasized breast cancer in February of 2001 after valiantly struggling with the disease for five years. After her death, in the years that followed, a large part of coping with the emptiness in my life was my art. I first started what I now call the "Fiberglass Busts Project" driven by subconscious motives I wouldn't understand until much later. It began from a need to create something out of the emptiness in my life, a time consuming project to fill my days with errands and give me a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Earlier in 2001, I had gotten it into my head that I wanted to create a sculpture using fiberglass, a media I had never worked with before. In the past, I had made countless three dimensional pieces out of paper mache, a favorite medium of mine. It is an easy, cheap and forgiving material to work with, but ultimately the end result always felt temporary. Of all the paper mache sculptures I had created in college, not one of them survived in a U-Haul. For what I was preparing to do, that subconscious motivation was telling me I needed to go stronger, more durable. permanent.