This series of welded steel sculptures explores the tension between strength and vulnerability in the healthcare journey, where each decision and experience maps a unique path toward healing or harm. These sculptures reflect how individuals and systems bend, adapt, and sometimes break under pressure, resilient in many moments, yet always carrying a threat of fragility.
Each day in medicine involves navigating a complex landscape shaped by shifting variables and unexpected combinations, all while working toward the best possible outcomes. Using industrial materials to portray deeply human experiences, the work invites viewers to consider how resilience and fragility shape outcomes in both people and systems.
Title: Human Variation
Artist: Camille Hancock Friesen
Media: 16-gauge flat steel, oxyacetylene weld
Dimensions: 7”W x 8”D x 13”H
Weight: 5 lbs
Date Created: 2023
This sculpture begins with an inverted triangle, barely touching the base, symbolizing the fragile, high-stakes nature of medical care. Above it, stacked forms shift and evolve, culminating in a solid quadrilateral that conveys resolution, growth, or insight. The shapes represent moments in a patient’s journey - data points, diagnoses, alternative approaches, or phases of care. While the balance appears uncertain, the upward flow reveals a consistent truth: how effectively the patient and care team can adapt, usually leading to good outcomes, even in complex, unpredictable cases.
Title: Learning Zone
Artist: Camille Hancock Friesen
Media: 16-gauge flat steel, oxyacetylene weld
Dimensions: 7”W x 8”D x 13”H
Weight: 5 lbs
Date Created: 2023
This sculpture represents how people - and systems - adapt under stress. The tilted triangle base suggests instability in healthcare, like burnout, limited resources, complexity, or a pandemic. In response, the upper forms shift and realign, symbolizing learning and resilience. Though their balance appears fragile, the overall movement is upward, illustrating growth within the “Learning Zone,” where challenge sparks transformation.
Title: Tipping Point
Artist: Camille Hancock Friesen
Media: 16-gauge flat steel; oxyacetylene weld
Dimensions: 7”W x 8”D x 13”H
Weight: 5 lbs
Date Created: 2023
With its sharply tilted base and uneven stack of forms, this sculpture conveys instability and imbalance. All elements lean precariously to one side, held together by tension, yet teetering on the edge of unraveling. The composition is top-heavy and stretched, as if straining against collapse. Unlike the steady ascent in Learning Zone, this sculpture is on the verge of falling, with no clear path to recovery. It captures the moment when stress overwhelms a system, and change becomes both inevitable and uncertain.
Title: Failure to Rescue
Artist: Camille Hancock Friesen
Media: 16-gauge flat steel; oxyacetylene weld
Dimensions: 7”W x 8”D x 13”H
Weight: 5 lbs
Date Created: 2023
This sculpture captures the moment a system begins to fail. In medicine, “failure to rescue” refers to what follows a complication - will the system respond, or will the patient be lost? The raised base sets the stage for a visible fall. The forms no longer rise but tumble downward in a cascade of disconnection. The energy and balance of earlier works give way to stillness, grief, and disarray. For the first time, the final quadrilateral is off-course and undone, marking not just a complication, but a failure to recover.
Title: Heap
Artist: Camille Hancock Friesen
Media: 16-gauge flat steel; oxyacetylene weld
Dimensions: 7”W x 8”D x 13”H
Weight: 5 lbs
Date Created: 2023
Systems under constant stress don’t just wear down, they often collapse completely. This sculpture captures that catastrophic failure. All structure is lost, and familiar points of interaction have vanished. The relationships between elements have unraveled, and any sense of order has eroded. Unlike the upward momentum seen in the Resilience and Fragility sculptures, there is no elevation here, only fragmentation. The forms sit in disjointed silence, reflecting a system pushed far beyond its limits to total disarray.
Title: She’s Come Undone
Artist: Camille Hancock Friesen
Media: 16-gauge flat steel; oxyacetylene weld; enamel
Dimensions: 7”W x 8”D x 13”H
Weight: 5 lbs
Date Created: 2023
This sculpture explores what happens as a system begins to break down. When parts are lost and structures start to unravel, elements open as pieces lift away, creating new forms and a sense of instability. Yet, within the disruption, something unexpected is revealed - vivid colors inside each form. These bright interiors suggest emotional depth, cultural perspective, or moments of joy in care. Even in collapse, individual resilience remains - the final burst of life in a system on the edge, with the outcome still unknown.
Title: Helter Skelter
Artist: Camille Hancock Friesen
Media: 16-gauge flat steel; oxyacetylene weld
Dimensions: 7”W x 8”D x 13”H
Weight: 5 lbs
Date Created: 2023
This sculpture explores the system reaching its breaking point as structures unravel in unpredictable ways. Unlike the solemn balance of earlier works, this piece leans into disorder with a touch of whimsy. Fragmented elements resemble butterfly wings, bubbles, or books flung open. Saturated colors reappear, hinting at emotional tone or the roles within a care team - surgery, cardiology, anesthesia, critical care - each carrying its own tone and rhythm. Even during collapse, collaboration, creativity, and curiosity exist.
Title: Minus 13
Artist: Camille Hancock Friesen
Media: 16-gauge flat steel; oxyacetylene weld
Dimensions: 7”W x 8”D x 13”H
Weight: 5 lbs
Date Created: 2023
This sculpture explores how little structure is needed to maintain the illusion of form. Starting with 26 steel elements - mirroring the alphabet - it examines how much can be taken away before the illusion of wholeness is lost. From one angle, the shapes still appear whole; from another, the missing pieces are unmistakable. The once-solid forms now hold space and absence in equal measure. Despite this erosion, the strength of the steel and its connection to the base offer a fragile but persistent sense of hope.
Title: Beauty in Brokenness
Artist: Camille Hancock Friesen
Media: 16-gauge flat steel, oxyacetylene weld
Dimensions: 7”W x 8”D x 13”H
Weight: 5lbs
Date Created: 2023
This sculpture begins with a tilted triangle, lightly touching the base, suggesting fragility and instability.Above it, five squares arc gracefully like frames in motion - a juggling act, a catapulted object, or the start of an infinite loop. With each step along the curve, the squares show increasing wear - small bends, surface dings, and openings that hint at inner loss. Though the forms are marked by damage, there’s an elegance in their rounded path. It holds both beauty and brokenness, a testament to the resilience that endures despite underlying damage.
Title: Dissevered
Artist: Camille Hancock Friesen
Media: 16-gauge flat steel; oxyacetylene weld
Dimensions: 12”W x 8”D x 5.5”H
Weight: 1.5 lbs
Date Created: 2024
This sculpture reflects the universal experience of both beauty and hardship, resilience, and fragility, held differently by each individual. A single square, representing the self, has been divided by deep cuts into ten uneven pieces. As the parts drift apart, symmetry breaks, and connection weakens. Yet, the arc ofmovement suggests not just loss, but transformation, and possibility. Even in the face of irreversible change, with the potential to either coalesce or devolve into chaos, a sense of forward momentum remains, and the chance for new forms of strength to emerge.
Title: Coalesce
Artist: Camille Hancock Friesen
Media: 16-gauge flat steel; oxyacetylene weld
Dimensions: 8”W x 12”D x 6”H
Weight: 1.5 lbs
Date Created: 2024
This sculpture explores how healing might follow illness or disruption. A square - symbolizing an individual - has been divided into ten uneven parts, each representing the impact of irreversible change. Unlike in Dissevered, the fractured pieces here have begun to return to one another, settling into a new, more ordered configuration. Though the original form isn’t fully restored, the elements have partially rejoined, creating a sense of near-wholeness. Coalesce reflects a journey not back to what was, but forward to a renewed sense of self.
Title: Chaos
Artist: Camille Hancock Friesen
Media: 16-gauge flat steel; oxyacetylene weld
Dimensions: 8”W x 12”D x 6”H
Weight: 1.5 lbs
Date Created: 2024
Each individual’s experience is shaped by change and the way they respond to it. Unlike in Coalesce, where the elements begin to return and reconnect, here the pieces continue to scatter. Their movement is dynamic, even explosive, suggesting the disorientation that can follow a profound disruption. The form no longer resembles its origin; the structure dissolves, and the system edges toward disorder. Chaos reflects a path where healing has not yet begun - but within the motion is the energy of possibility, still unsettled, and still unfolding.