Review: Mammary Mountain by Phil Sun
An interactive VR project by Tara Baoth Mooney, Camille Baker, and Maf’J Alvarez, Mammary Mountain takes us on a multi-sensorial journey into the experience of breast cancer. “Illness is an outpost: lunar, arctic, difficult to reach,” writes Sinead Gleeson, “The location of an unrelatable experience never fully understood by those lucky enough to avoid it.” This experience transports audiences to that outpost, animating its dimensions through the perspectives of cancer patients.
The experience is set in a doctor’s office, where the audience is asked to fill out a questionnaire for incoming patients, before they’re dressed in mammography gowns and fitted with a haptic jacket and a VR headset. When the animation begins, the audience is immediately immersed in a three-dimensional world composed of animated landscapes, testimonies, evocative music, and field recordings, accompanied by vibrations generated by the haptic jacket.
Our portal to this world is a heart-shaped hagstone. A hagstone is a stone with a hole naturally worn into the mineral by time. Considered a magical talisman in Irish folklore, the hagstone allows the user to see the witch or fairy behind their disguise; here the user might apprehend the bodily traumas of others. Through the hole in the hagstone we reach the shore of a moonlit body of water, where a feminine figure examines the glowing scarlet lump on her breast. Luminescent lines undulate along her skin, suggestive of topographical marks. Various voices describe the discoveries of their tumours. At one point medical vocabulary is deployed, disclosing a tumour’s exact location in abstract language; the body relayed as data. Meanwhile the waters rise; we’re waist-deep, unsure of our footing here.
Testimony is essential to the audience’s comprehension of this world. Eight survivors recount their experiences of treatment. We’re told about mastectomies, reconstructive surgeries, and drains, of bodies rearranged into something unrecognisable to the self. During chemotherapy, toxic shock and incredible fatigue are followed by brief recovery times, before the cycle is repeated; a loop, in which one is “mending and unravelling”, over and over again, while feeling out of touch with the world, “passing through other people, or tripping over them.”
As we listen to these accounts, we’re drawn into a series of dream-like interiors and 2 landscapes. Rendered in startling three-dimensionality, these psychological spaces correspond to stages of cancer treatment. Claustrophobic rooms or apocalyptic terrains alternate with tranquil scenes of repose and healing. We might look down and see the ground fall away or find ourselves floating in water, heightening our connection to story.
This world is also viscerally felt: the haptic vest dispatches electrically generated pulses to the areas of the body affected by the disease and its treatment, their intensity varying according to the severity of a treatment’s effects, at times inducing anxiety. We’re always reminded that we have a body, aware that this story could potentially be our own in the future. Sympathy is felt by the body, as well as thought, a matter of apprehending, through the senses, the experiences of Others.
Guides reveal themselves, filaments of myth transformed into guardians in an alien, sometimes hostile world. A púca appears in a dream before a surgery, luck-bringer and shapechanger. During chemotherapy, the Friendly Giantess appears, described as “a me”, “a me that could mind me.” For this world contains not only trauma but also the possibility of healing and repair, magicks linked to nature. Essential to life, water as reparative element recurs. A pre-surgery swim in the starry sea offers succor. A bell rings: we’re hip-deep in the serene waters of a holy well, a ‘thin place’, situated between the natural and supernatural realms. Above us the Friendly Giantess reaches into the leafy canopy as petals drift down. The world branches, unfurls, and fruits. Nature is a source of immense vitality. The body is described as an extension of the land, entwined with it in a “mutual exchange of tenderness”. Sheep’s wool, feathers, kelp, hagstone: these are “kin”, part of a magical inventory of things found in nature, amulets providing care and protection in an uncertain present. Treatment will ransack the ill body, but if it retains its affinity with nature, the self will never lack therapeutic resources.
What makes Mammary Mountain so powerful is how the audience is drawn away from its usual position as detached spectator by an alchemy of oral testimony, imagined space, and haptic pulses. We’re present in a way that involves our whole body, attentive to the correspondences between what is said and seen to what is felt in real time. The world of illness is no longer secret and invisible, but accessible and intimately felt.
Phil Sun is a critical art writer based in Leitrim.
