[Mail] A Toronto artist who has been sculpting with natural materials since 1991 was shocked when she learned that mussel shells she had worked with for 15 years caused her to suffer heavy-metal poisoning.
Gillian Genser, a 59-year-old sculptor based in Toronto, began using blue mussel shells in 2000 while working on the sculpture of Adam, the first man. She had made a statue of Lilith, just before, but using eggshells.
'The shells came from Atlantic Canada, and I’d buy them in bulk in Chinatown, so that I could sort through the bins and choose shells in the shapes I wanted,' she wrote in a personal essay for Toronto Life. |