Feature: Textile sculptures celebrate pioneering surgery
24 February 2009. By Penny Bailey
During World War I, many soldiers suffered severe facial injuries. At Queen Mary's Hospital in Sidcup, pioneering surgeon Sir Harold Gillies endeavoured to give back more than 5000 such servicemen their pre-war faces.
Gillies pioneered skin-grafting techniques to rebuild faces using tissue from elsewhere in the body. He developed a staged approach, grafting small areas of skin over time, allowing the patient to recover between surgeries. His techniques have been refined and are still used today to treat injuries following road traffic accidents, facial cancers, assaults, and a host of other traumas and diseases.
Gillies was a great recorder of the work performed at the plastic surgery unit: each serviceman's record contained handwritten notes, pen-and-ink pre-operative sketches and X-rays. He also pioneered the use of sequential photographs to document the patients' progress through multiple surgeries. These original patient and surgical notes, sketches and photographs of the men form part of The Gillies Archive, Queen Mary's Hospital in Sidcup, which has been collated and curated by Dr Andrew Bamji.
Inspiration for Project Façade
Those notes inspired artist Paddy Hartley to bring the stories of some of these servicemen to as wide an audience as possible. He was awarded a Wellcome Trust Production Award, andProject Façade - a series of sculptures created from military uniforms similar to those worn by the men when they were injured - was born.
Each sculpture represents a single patient, and the cloth of the sculptural garments represents the skin, embellished with the physical consequences of the action the men saw, and the surgery they underwent.
"It is the most logical method of communicating the surgery," explains Hartley. He stresses that the sculptures communicate the repair, rather than the replication, of injury.
As Hartley explored the records more deeply, he found among the medical terminology the occasional emotive phrase or comment. These inspired him to shift the project from one that explained the surgery patients underwent, to the stories of the patients. Who they were, how and where they were injured, and how they lived the rest of their lives.
"I wanted to know how these extraordinary men coped with their injuries in everyday life. These were real lives I was dealing with, real experiences and real emotions. They were stories that must be told."
So Hartley began to trace and collaborate with the families of Gillies' patients, recording their recollections of the later lives of these injured World War I servicemen. He then added these snapshots and memories of lives lived before and after military service to the sculptures.
Words and text, including case notes and testimony from their relatives, are stitched into the fabric, alongside photographs and other mementos, to make the uniforms 'speak' - to tell their terrible, courageous and personal stories.
William Spreckley's story
One of the subjects of Hartley's sculptures was 2nd Lieutenant William Michael Spreckley (Michael to his family). His case is one of the most extensively documented at the archive and, in combination with contributions from William's family, is the most complete work Hartley has produced.
On 14 January 1917, William was serving on the Western Front, near Ypres. He suffered severe facial injuries from a grenade blast, which completely removed his nose - both cartilage and flesh.
He was transferred to Queen Mary's Hospital at Sidcup where, to recreate the missing nose structure, Gillies used a piece of William's rib cartilage, which he shaped like an arrow.
William later married and raised a large family - eight children and, later, 35 grandchildren. In grateful recognition of his work, he named his first son Michael Gillies. However, his wartime experiences left him physically and emotionally scarred for the rest of his life. He had symptoms that might now be recognised as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Hartley has told Spreckley's story in two uniform sculptures: 'Spreckley 1' describes his youth and life up until he received his injury. 'Spreckley 2' is concerned with his treatment and later life.
Both sculptures have been seen, poignantly side by side, in the War and Medicine exhibition at Wellcome Collection. This explored the constantly evolving relationship between warfare and medicine, from the disasters of the Crimean War to today's conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Images: Wellcome Library, London