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The Swallowing Plates
By Amy Dunn

At a small art shop in the heart of Pasadena, a wall is lined with old black-and-white photos mounted on pretty Victorian-era plates. The Swallowing Plates: Objects swallowed and recovered from the human body tells the fictionalized stories of 34 people who ingested items other than food.

The artist, Lisa Wood, was inspired by one of the world's leading laryngologists, Chevalier Jackson (1865-1958), and the objects he recovered from his patient's lungs and windpipes over the years. She found the phenomenon fascinating and decided to create her own characters with unique stories explaining the items found in their bodies.

Her subjects range from infants to the elderly and everyone in between. The items recovered represent a peculiar spectrum including safety pins, crab claws, crosses, and buttons, just to name a few. Each case has its own story including an explanation for the ingestion and whether or not the subject survived. The stories are concise and interesting, such as the old couple who, after 48 years of marriage, made good on a pact to commit double suicide and swallowed 18 pieces of glass. The aged, rustic photos of her characters make it clear they are from the 19th century, but she has also included their age, name, and date of incidence on each plate.

Each picture is mounted on a Victorian-style plate, ranging in size from a few inches around to full-size dinner plates. Wood has adorned the oval framed pictures and plates with various items such as lace, doilies, and velvet pieces. The frilly decorations are feminine and unassuming, a contrast to the dark and sometimes disturbing stories they accompany.

Wood expresses her signature style with this collection; she always uses photographs in her artwork to memorialize the dead. Most of the pictures she uses in The Swallowing Plates she purchased on E-Bay. She obtained the plates used in the display from various places such as garage sales and antique stores. Though the photos, plates, and adornments were retrieved from different places each item melds well with the overall look of the exhibit. The different sizes of the plates match the varying sizes of the photos.

The San Francisco-based artist admits that she has always had an affinity for the strange and bizarre, which is one of the reasons she was drawn to Chevalier Jackson and his collection of Foreign Bodies Removed from the Food and Air Passages, on display at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. Her formal art history includes creating jewelry using vintage photographs and incorporating nature motifs into her work.

The Swallowing Plates is a unique endeavor and an immensely interesting collection of original art to behold. In addition to the plates themselves, Wood has created a small book of the swallowing plates and their matching stories, which can be purchased at Gold Bug in Pasadena.

The Swallowing Plates: Objects swallowed and recovered from the human body is currently on display at Gold Bug, 22 East Union Street, Pasadena.

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