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Sandrock says that her nursing experience of 25 years in lifesaving organ transplants and surgeries has inspired her  to create art forms that encourage people to view different parts of the body as "commodities" not so much as items to be bought or sold but as things of great personal value and importance  in sustaining one's own and other's lives. Sandrock left the medical field in the early 90's to pursue these goals and graduated from the Ottawa School of Fine Art in 1997.  Her  artworks take the direction of creating replicas of 'body parts' using ceramic, wax, clay, and other materials, and critically assembling them into installations that will cause the viewer to more fully realize  how valuable life is and the importance of body parts. Sandrock relates that her  experiences of holding warm, live body parts prior to transplant, and seeing lives sustained has made this artistic endeavor  a very spiritual and emotional one . Sandrock's  works have been exhibited in her native Canada, Mexico, Chile, and most recently at the Arts & Design Society of Fort Walton Beach, Florida. The exhibitions  are arranged as though on display at a department store; on shelves, crated, or in plastic bags. Sandrock does not support the sale of body parts. Those viewing her exhibitions will see bar-codes on some of the bones. Sandrock explains that this satirical twist is done  to reinforce her  feelings that body parts should not be sold.

		On  the  left, the "Memorial Mammogram Wall" showing a montage of 77 mammograms hanging in front of the wall. For each mammogram photo, a clay breast lies discarded on the floor in front of the montage to symbolize what can be lost if women don't have mammograms.		A ceramic heart

Depicting cloned body parts, one dish is full of unruly pieces of ceramic vertebrae and bone fragments; a second, is populated by a row of repeating kidneys; over  the third, a ceramic trachea and lung hover  near a femur, mottled marble pancreas, and ceramic heart. The diffused green light represents the growth conditions necessary for the cloning process. At present, Sandrock says that she is against cloning, there are still too many unknowns and risks.

				Sandra Dyck, Carlton University, Ottawa, Canada writes, "Sandrock approaches the commodified body with caution and calm. The faux laboratory environment  she creates is austere and elegant; the clean white organs seem suspended in the rarefied green light. Her only  concession to visceral reality is a ceramic heart, glazed in a fleshy blood red and stood on end near  the lung. Sandrock's petri dishes--ethereal and unreal--are pristine islands of calm in a sea of intense, hyperbolic debate. As such, her installation allows contemplative consideration of issues at the core of life and death."

Maureen Sandrock can be contacted using the hyperlink below:
mailto: maureensandrock@hotmail.com