Blog

by Shelley Kerr

 

This is my story about the relationship between art and life and how this has played out for me. It is about the creative impulse or motivation or inspiring events that have shaped my artistic expression. It is also about sharing with you a few of the creative pathways that I use to get the job done.

 

Without going into a deep, philosophical dive into the meaning of life or the meaning of art…why even try to separate them? Life informs, digests, ingests, inspires, transpires, evolves, devolves…into the expression of art. And art reflects, dilates, points to new directions, helps to emote, learn, conspire and inform…the human experience.

 

My creative path started in high school with a very cool art teacher that let us explore and play. I was welding in the shop, throwing clay on the wheel and building sculptures by hand. A seed was planted. Years later when faced with my father’s death, I decided to buy some clay, build a pack of Camel cigarettes and then cathartically, destroy the cigarettes that “caused” my father’s cancer. I never built the cigarette pack, I just started sculpting the human face and taking art classes.

 

Now, I am fighting my own cancer. This battle has driven me to a more creative state. This is a precious time. I could have died 2 years ago, but I’m alive and feel healthy. I’m in high gear to express life and art through sculpture, dance and sharing music with my beloved husband. I choose life, expression, joy, sharing—all forms of love--over despair.

 

Overcoming obstacles to creativity:

I hear so often from people, “I don’t have a creative bone in my body.” There’s an inner judge that comes in and says, “You are SO bad…just throw it away before anyone sees it.” I’ve experienced this too. I had to address this judge and point to the door and command, “GET OUT”! This gave me room to play. That’s when the courage to just create—to just start somewhere--came pouring in.

 

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,

the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” 

Albert Einstein

 

Image from the Institute for Advanced Study

 

 

Here are some ways that I play and create art.

 

The Intellectual Approach for “To Live”

Getting cancer, and wanting to express it creatively, threw me into a dilemma. How do I represent this life-threatening, ugly disease in a positive manner? I had to think my way through it. I could build a life-size human bladder IN BRONZE (which caused me to both smile and cringe). Or build a sculpture representing the flame of life, which would symbolize my experience. This didn’t work for me either…too general, too meaningless. So, I let it go and let the challenge stew away in my mind. I needed some time.

 

“Creativity involves not only years of conscious preparation and training

but unconscious preparation as well.”  

Oliver Slacks

 

I cannot recall the exact tracing of how I came upon the idea of using the Greek language for the “To Live” piece. It was some combination of conscious and unconscious effort. But I knew it was right. This knowing is a very calm, quiet place. I just knew. The rest of the creative process was just puzzling it through to an end result. This is how and when I play.

 

 

The Dream Approach for the “Nebra Sky Disk” series

I had a dream about the 7 Sisters star constellation…The Pleiades. It was one of those vibrant dreams, where you wake up very aware of the specifics. The dream vibrated. OK…I got it. I was going to do something around the Pleiades as a sculpting project.

 

A color-composite image of the Pleiades from the Digitized Sky Survey

NASA/ESA/AURA/Caltech

 

Through a couple of random events, in the course of just living life: running errands, shopping, eating, and exercising brought The Pleiades to the surface again. One day I found a really cool book at the bookstore called The Big History. It is a beautiful, visual book starting from the Big Bang to current times with a view to the future. The very first plate in the book was an image of the Nebra Sky Disk which included, along with the sun and the moon, a representation of The Pleiades star constellation. It was a sign!

 

LDA Sachsen-Anhalt (Photo by Jaraj Liptak)

Halle State Museum of Prehistory, Germany

 

What made this even more interesting, it that the Nebra Sky Disk is old bronze…1600 BCE found in Nebra, Germany. Its makers accurately placed the Pleiades constellation on the sky disk as it would have been seen in the German sky in 1600 BCE.

 

Bronze and The Pleiades? There’s that knowing place again. The rest of the creative process was just puzzling through it.

 

 

The Theta Wave Approach for the “Nebra Sky Disk” series

 

So, the project is set. I know I’m doing something with the Nebra Sky Disk. The idea is in that ruminating phase: the conscious and subconscious collaboration.

 

A year ago, I started getting acupuncture therapy. I love acupuncture! Some folks are bothered by the needles…or the idea of needles. My experience has been that the needles are so small that you don’t feel them. Once the acupuncturist has set the needles, they are invisible to me; however, I want to stay still so as not to disrupt them. A perfect opportunity for theta brainwaves.

 

In his book, The Creative Brain, Ned Herrmann describes theta waves as a type of brainwave that occurs in a drowsy state or during a repetitive activity. This state can also lead to nice ideating…the flow of thought. Sometimes, I fall asleep during the session, but more often I’m just playing around with sculpting ideas. I’m daydreaming. This happens at other times of my day, maybe during a long shower or a walk.

Image: Ned Herrmann, The Creative Brain

 

 

Amazingly, Ludwig van Beethoven may have used this same approach. In his biography on Beethoven,  Johann Aloys Schlösser states, “He went on walks in the woods to come up with ideas, solutions, new themes. He would then return to his studio and capture it all.”

 

In Beethoven’s words, “Then the working-out in breadth, length, height and depth begins in my head, and since I am conscious of what I want, the basic idea never leaves me. It rises, grows upward, and I hear and see the picture as a whole take shape and stand forth before me as though cast in a single piece, so that all that is left is the work of writing it down.”  Ludwig van Beethoven

 

Portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820

 

It begins to make sense that, even when he had lost much of his hearing, he could still write amazing music…he could see it.

 

Back to acupuncture, I will go into this relaxed state and play around with ideas. The Nebra Sword piece came about this way. Oftentimes, I will wake up from the session and I’ll notice that my hands are raised up in the air as if sculpting an imaginary object. Cool.

 

An added plus is the removal of the “You can’t do this” judge. In an article, “What is the function of the various brainwaves?” in Scientific American, it states, “The ideation that can take place during the theta state is often free flow and occurs without censorship or guilt. It is typically a very positive mental state.”

 

So being in a theta brainwave pattern, I can play and daydream without the school yard monitor hovering around! The judge is removed.

 

The good news:

The good news is that there is more than one way to skin a cat…more than one way to a creative experience or result. Over the years, I have become more and more comfortable and dependent on these approaches with the great anticipation of new approaches coming my way.

 

This is my story: my high school art room experiences planted a seed; the event of my father’s death set me in motion as a more serious sculptor; my own battle with cancer has sent me into overdrive as an artist.

 

Somewhere along the way, my inner judge disappeared releasing me to play. I now see creative results in other parts of my life and in the lives of people around me. Cooking a meal, planting a garden, running a business, planning my day and playing with clay are all creative expressions of life.

 

by Shelley Kerr

 

The following is a blow by blow accounting of the bladder cancer that I have been fighting for the last five years and living at Stage 4 for four of those five years.

 

(Spoiler Alert: as of 1 month ago, I am NO LONGER at Stage 4. Thanks to the combination of immunotherapy and surgery, there are NO cancerous lymph nodes in my body. Hallelujah!)

 

And I realized the physical world exists so that love can make sense,

because without the frame of fear and doubt and suffering, love is effortless and meaningless.

I believed that we volunteer our souls to come into the physical world so that we can do battle with fear.

John Perry Barlow

 

I just came across the excerpt in John's autobiography Mother American Night-my life in crazy times and it made me cry. I knew John from years ago in a very different part of my life. I have loved reading his autobiography. I included it here to signal to you that there was so much more happening to me than this blow-by-blow accounting of events. I will dig in and share my mind and heart with you in a future communications.

 

 

Year One:

I thought I was passing kidney stones in the spring of 2014 which landed me in emergency rooms. I was later diagnosed with a malignant tumor in my left kidney which compromised its function. There is still a lot of mystery around cancer…for me, it was that the bladder cancer originated in my left kidney. The other mystery is that I got it in the first place. I’ve never smoked (50% of bladder cancers are tied to smoking cigarettes), have no genetic ties and didn’t hang around solvents for work or hobbies. It was just a random event. Really?

 

After a biopsy confirmed this diagnosis, they removed my kidney through my navel. That is ok I think, “I have two kidneys.”

 

Metastasis #1:  Within a few months, the cancer appeared in my bladder. I was a high risk for this; a fact that didn’t fully register with me at the time. I went through the first type of immunotherapy: BCG. It is an inactive strain of tuberculosis introduced directly in to the bladder to “enliven” the bladder’s natural immune system.

 

I was feeling fine, so while waiting for the BCG medication to arrive—my husband and I

went to Africa for work and play to Victoria Falls. Note the nice long hair.

 

After returning from our trip, I went through the BCG therapy. While on the BCG, the cancer progressed to Stage 3. It didn’t work for me.

 

Year Two:

Great…January and I’m at Stage 3 in my bladder. It was time to change clinics and I headed for the University of Minnesota’s urology clinic and Dr. Konety.

 

Metastasis #2:  Upon the surgical removal of my left kidney through my navel in 2014, a tumor was seeded there and—BAM—I’m at Stage 4 in the spring of 2015. This was the first time I heard the word terminal from a resident and the first time I would feel like I was looking down the barrel of a gun.

 

That spring, I went through rigorous chemo-therapy treatment and by summer, Dr. Konety replaced my bladder with a neobladder. A neobladder is formed from a section of your small intestine that is repurposed into a new, complete bladder.  Good bye bladder!

 

Dave's sister was inspired in the middle of the night regarding my plight and wrote this most amazing tribute to my bladder. Thank you, Lisa, for making things a bit lighter.

 

During 2015, I began a large welded piece. There I was, in the art studio halfway through chemo…and I’m bald. Guess I won’t catch my hair on fire! I returned to the studio in the fall to finish “Parallel Universe.”  The ravens are gazing through an opening from opposite sides…of the universe.

 

 

Metastasis #3: Within a few months, the cancer metastasized as a new tumor just outside of my bladder. My oncologist, Dr. Jha tells me, “We can prolong your life with chemotherapy.” (Can we say palliative?)  Although NONE of my doctors ever used the word terminal, nor did they EVER say, "You have 3-6-9 months to live.”  With chemotherapy as my only choice, I knew what quality of life I would have and I was out of options. Terminal. Now I really felt like I was looking down the barrel of a gun.

 

 

I helped organize a Viennese ball in Colorado in the fall of 2015. I still feel well enough to enjoy another passion…ballroom dancing.

I did more organizing than dancing that night. Even though this was a really scary time for me, I still lived my life and did the things that brought me joy.

 

My husband and I only had to live in this state for a few days and an amazing state of grace took over me. Fine, the cancer got me (I thought), but I still had choices in how I would go through this last phase of life. Grace.

 

As my husband, Dave, and I were driving through Nebraska on our way to our families in Colorado for Thanksgiving and to inform them of how sick I was…I made a phone call to the clinic. I was going to go ahead with the chemotherapy and needed to set up the infusion sessions. In that conversation, I learned that I was NOT going to have to do the chemotherapy, rather I was going to have access to a break-through immunotherapy called Nivolumab. There we were, doing the “happy dance” in the middle of I-80 in the middle of Nebraska. How strange. How wonderful.

 

The simplest way I can describe immunotherapy is this: immunotherapy finds a way to enable your own, natural immune system do what it is designed to do…kill dangerous cells. Cancer has found a way to cloak itself and immunotherapy finds a way to uncloak it. The T-cells (the warriors of the immune system) go to work and kill the cancer cells. The therapy part of immunotherapy varies wildly depending on what type of cancer it is. For me, it was administered through an IV every two weeks. That was it.

 

Year Three (sooooo glad Year Two was over)

After 7 infusions of Nivolumab, I am tumor-free. As happens with immunotherapies, sometimes your immune system gets super-charged and, along with killing the cancer cells, can also attack healthy tissues. It is called an auto-immune response.

 

My own immune system hit my joints—nearly all of them (ok, my ankles and elbows were spared). I couldn’t move without pain. If I didn’t move, I was perfectly comfortable. Thankfully, a couple of steroid blasts pulled me out of the inflammation…FAST. But steroids and immunotherapy are not compatible and I had to stop taking them both.

 

On vacation on Lake Superior with friends that summer. What a beautiful get-a-way.

 

I’m on high-level surveillance regarding this cancer; I have either PET or CAT scans every 3 months. Within a few months, a PET scan reveals half a dozen cancerous lymph nodes in different locations in my body.

 

Metastasis #4

 

REALLY?! It has metastasized AGAIN?

 

Miraculously, I am feeling great. After all the drama with the joint inflammation, I began working out at the health club and rebuilding my body. My husband and I were able to ride bikes and kayaks and play golf. I was able to dance, play music and sculpt. I was feeling healthy!

 

Year Four:

The lymph nodes that show up on the PET scan are definitely cancerous, but they are small sized and low on the PET scan uptake scale. So we watch them and look for changes. This strategy goes on for 1 ½ years—taking me into 2018.

 

In the meantime, there are big developments and accelerated FDA approval of immunotherapies for bladder cancer and all kinds of other cancers. In the spring of 2017, 5 immunotherapies are approved for bladder cancer. This is break-through stuff, because previously bladder cancer treatment had not changed for decades…just surgery and chemo-therapy. Been there, done that.

 

So the longer I wait, the more research results come in, the more immunotherapies might be approved. I’m willing to take this chance.

 

My confidence is building. I have options. I have numerous weapons at my disposal. I now feel that—like so much of the rest of the human population—I don’t know what will end my life. Who even thinks of these things on a day to day basis?

 

So I spend the next 18 months feeling normal. Each quarter I go in for a scan and nothing trends. Some lymph nodes get worse, some better, some new, some disappear…no trending. So I live my life. Loving Dave. Enjoying friends and family and travel and hobbies. Life is good and normal.

 

I live at Stage 4.

 

Year Five:

My doctors never used the word “cure” with immunotherapy, so my expectations were realistic. Cancer wants to survive and has mechanisms to clone or mutate to get around the effects of the immunotherapy. Sure enough, in February this year, my scan showed a trend for the worst in all of my cancerous lymph nodes. I feel the lasting effect of Nivolumab had been working all this time, but it is time to take a different route.

So I begin treatment with a new immunotherapy, given the fabulous name of…are you ready…atezolizumab (I want THAT job…coming up with cool, confusing, hard-to-spell-and-pronounce terminology). I have also moved my care to Dr. Flaig at the University of Colorado Anschultz.

 

I’ve been on atezolizumab for 8 months with no side effects. (Yea!)  By May, it has reduced all the lymph nodes in my body, except one. This is a stubborn, non-responsive lymph node right above my collar bone. I can touch it and see it and I’m mad! I’m warrior mad and want to stab it like in the movie Psycho.

 

I give it a name…Bill. I would introduce Bill to my doctors, nurses and the radiation technicians. “Hi. I’d like you to meet Bill. We’re going to Kill Bill.” They got it. I got it. So on to radiation to kill this one stubborn lymph node. This radiation goes well and reduces Bill to a shadow of his former self.

 

I’m still feeling great and living my life to the point where I schedule a trip to England to ride horses with my sister in the fall. This is an important trip for both of us and a big risk for me. On month before we leave I get a second lump right above the old killed Bill node. I know what it is and I think I might have to cancel the trip. After all…this is CANCER.

 

Nope…went on the trip and had a marvelous time.

 

My sister and I rode our English horses for hours each day on the moors of Cornwall.

At the end of the day, it was a great kind of tired. Joy and big animals!

 

Upon returning from England, it was time to take care of this latest tumor. I ended up deciding on surgery and just as a precaution Dr. Flaig ordered a PET scan 4 days before the surgery. If I had other cancerous lymph nodes in my body, the surgery would be a waste. As it turned out, my PET scan came back CLEAN except for the single cancerous lymph node at my neck. THIS IS AMAZING NEWS!

 

So, after surgery, I can now claim that I am tumor-free! I’m no longer at Stage 4!! What a feeling. What a miracle!

 

The result?

I have, with great creativity and stubbornness, lived my life. I have NOT let the cancer define me. I have NOT yielded to the fear of dying. I have NOT become bitter, because without any genetic ties, without exposure to chemical solvents and without inhaling…I got cancer.

 

I have learned what true love is--from my husband, my family and our friends.

 

I have learned about the power of prayer, in all the different forms that prayer takes. I have felt the power of prayer sent by family, dear friends and sometimes...strangers.

 

I have learned that I can handle very scary things with grace and love and joy.

 

Cancer may shorten my life, but in some ways it has been a precious gift.