Four years ago my mother called to tell me that her best friend and one of my personal female heroines, Lovey Meeker, was diagnosed with cancer. In fact she had thousands of small tumors in her brain. But tumors never start in the brain - they had metastasized from her breast. Lovey died the following year. Ever since Lovey's death I have been addressing the complicated and tragic effects of breast cancer in my work. Cancer is an epidemic. In one year alone cancer will kill nearly twice as many Americans as were killed in all of World War II. And, statistically, this year one woman in every eight will be diagnosed with breast cancer.

In 1996 I began interviewing women from the Colorado area who were living with breast cancer. After two years of interviewing and photographing these women the work evolved into common threads, an exhibit of photographic quilts. In my family and others' the quilt has been an object of nostalgia and comfort. It was a way for the women in my family to make their own mark when it was not always appropriate for a woman to be heard. It is an object with which my mother told me stories and defined our family history. The quilt can also be understood as an object of comfort, but by placing such an uncomfortable subject on such a "soft" surface, the difficulties of dealing with a

1. Peggy Miller, "My mother had only one breast to feed me on." Heat transfer and velvet quilt, 77"W x 95"H

In the Breast Cancer History Quilt I have presented a patchwork of the history of breast cancer. Instead of chronicling the history in an academic manner I have included varied references to give the viewer only a sense of the history of the disease. The earliest extant medical documents of breast cancer appear in Egyptian papyri from the eighteenth dynasty, 1587-1328 B.C.E. The first successful mastectomy was in the 1700's, and since the accounts in the Egyptian papyri only four advancements have been made towards the treatment of breast cancer: the mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation and Tamoxofin, a drug based hormone therapy. The center image on the quilt is a computer generated image of Fanny Burney with her diary entries from her mastectomy in 1811 typed in red text over her portrait. The diary entry is horrific and in many ways impossible to imagine. Fanny Burney endured her mastectomy without anesthesia. She is an English writer from the 1800's who has written one of the first personal accounts of breast cancer. Her account is written at a time when it was very inappropriate for a woman, or anyone for that matter, to talk about breast cancer. Similar to the women I have interviewed she has told her story. Through the history quilt I am addressing the timeless nature of breast cancer and the common assumption that cancer is a disease of the 20th century.

As an artist I am attempting to walk the fine line between activist and aesthetic practices. As Jim Goldberg has said, "I am interested in telling stories and dispelling stereotypes." I'm interested in bearing witness. I want to create images of powerful women, images which speak of the depth of experience and not of the victimization of disease. As Susan Sontag states about cancer, "Victims suggest innocence. And innocence, by the inexorable logic that governs all relational terms, suggests guilt." I have not attempted to represent the realities of the disease in the way that a patient might be photographed in the hospital. Instead I have photographed these women and the objects they create and alter to personalize their experience metaphorically. The work often visually disassociates itself from the pain and trauma of breast cancer, while the text and stories relay the intensity associated with this type of disease.