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The Watson Clinic Cancer & Research Center at 1730 Lakeland Hills Blvd. has added five vibrant portraits to its second floor waiting area. The series, “Legacy Lane: Celebrating Survivorship,” introduces an on-going exhibit to celebrate life after cancer.
Tiffany Van Wieren, Watson Clinic Foundation’s Arts in Medicine program director, says these photos give patients “a glimpse as to what their story can be.”
Watson Clinic Foundation’s “Legacy Lane” is inspired by similar projects including portraits of survivors of trauma at Cleveland’s MetroHealth. Photographer Scott Audette took a unique approach. He wasn’t aiming for traditional. He encouraged his subjects to take risks and express themselves authentically. “It was a fun way to celebrate survivorship,” Audette said. “Here they are: surviving, celebrating, living.”
Portraits of Survivors
“Passport to Possibility,” featuring Doug Landback, is the first and largest portrait. He looks out and up, toward the horizon. Landback wears a flight cap with goggles on his head, a Hawaiian shirt printed with scarlet macaws. A white scarf wraps around his neck. He holds an oversized paper airplane.
Landback’s portrait celebrates the joy he finds in travel, which he returned to following his treatment for lung cancer. Placards that accompany the portraits link to each survivor’s story. In his, Landback explains, “Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer … We travel to lose ourselves, only to find ourselves.”
“Legacy Lane” at Watson Clinic Cancer & Research Center | Anna Toms, LkldNow 
Doug Landback’s “Legacy Lane” portrait | Anna Toms, LkldNow 
Doug Ballard’s “Legacy Lane” portrait | Anna Toms, LkldNow 
Heather Specht’s “Legacy Lane” portrait | Anna Toms, LkldNow 
Tanisha McLachlan’s “Legacy Lane” portrait | Anna Toms, LkldNow 
Sara Durante’s “Legacy Lane” portrait | Anna Toms, LkldNow
Around the corner, Doug Ballard sports a black suit with a red tie. He wears cat ears, a tail, and his face is painted. Ballard playfully raises a paw below his chin. This portrait is called “9 Lives Later.”
Ballard says that he’s alive today thanks to his nine lives. Before surviving an aggressive form of colon cancer, he experienced a vertebrae detachment that could have led to paralyzation and a “widow maker” heart attack. The clock in the background of his photo is set to 3 o’clock, representing his three life-threatening health challenges.
Next in line, Heather Specht wears a sparkling, baby blue gown and her accessories include a firefighter’s heavy coat and helmet, a flame that rises from her palm. She is “Crowned from the Ashes.”
“There’s a portion in your life after you finish it, where you’re kind of floundering a bit, not really sure what to do next, because your plans before — you didn’t even know if you were going to make it,” she said.
Specht was a princess performer and firefighter before her diagnosis. She left the fire department for treatment, but still felt as if she were battling fires.
“I felt like I was consumed in flames — that’s kind of how you feel the entire treatment,” she said. “This captures the fact that not only did I make it out alive, but I feel like I’m still carrying water for the women that are still left inside.”
Specht wants her photo and story to inspire patients: “I had stage four, so I think a lot of women, while they’re sitting here, like I was: sad, scared … whether with someone or without a support system, they can sit and read that and see that they can actually make it through the other side.”
In the next portrait, “Winning at Life,” Tanisha McLachlan sits atop a yellow pillar in the spotlight of a golden star. Her face and bright blue shirt are splattered with mud. She wears a crown of red, yellow and blue roses atop her head.
McLachlan’s portrait was inspired by a portrait she painted at Faces of Courage camp for people affected by cancer. Audette recreated McLachlan’s headpiece and necklace from the painting, then incorporated a defining experience after completing treatment: “I’ve done so many different things since having cancer,” said McLachlan. “I went on the mud run. … That’s supposed to be on the podium.”
“Cancer was life changing,” McLachlan said. “I felt like I was new. I got new hair, new breasts, a new outlook on life. I got another chance at life.” She has a tattoo on her inner forearm that reads “I’m here.” When challenges come her way, she thinks, “I’m here to deal with it, so I’m thankful for that.”
Finally, in “Reborn Beneath the Surface,” Sara Durante floats underwater, in a white, Grecian gown, an umbilical cord extending from her navel and wrapping through the photo. “I was expecting to take a studio photo in a teal dress or something to represent ovarian cancer, and then they were like, let’s put you under water with an umbilical cord,” Durante said.
Durante was diagnosed with ovarian cancer through a positive pregnancy test. “At my first ultrasound, they said ‘sorry, there’s no baby. There’s a tumor’,” Durante said. “So I underwent surgery, chemotherapy.” And then 10 years of IVF before giving birth to her son, who is now a toddler.
“The picture just is kind of like a rebirth, coming back to life after having cancer and thinking that you’d never have a family or a future even, and to have it all now.”
Durante is president of the Ovarian Cancer Support Group. “We reach out to women all over the county who are going through ovarian cancer,” she said.
Life after treatment
Van Wieren hopes these portraits and the survivors’ stories will inspire patients going through cancer treatment.
“There’s not a lot that depicts survivorship,” Van Wieren said. “We have a growing group of survivors … we get better at treating it, we get better at catching it earlier … and so I thought what a wonderful way to depict not only their stories … but also to give hope to those who are going through treatment.”
Van Wieren said the whimsical quality of Audette’s photos can help viewers see from a new perspective. “We get very stuck in our thinking. We like normalcy, we like things to go a certain way,” she said. “When we’re able to utilize art in a way that helps us to alter that path, it allows us to step outside of those traditional thoughts and really truly reflect in a new way.”
Healing through the arts
Van Wieren said they plan to add portraits of additional survivors to “Legacy Lane” each year. These inaugural five portraits will be on display at the cancer center for at least a year, as more survivors’ stories are documented. After that, they hope the original five can go on tour to other cancer centers and expand their reach.
Also read our related article
“Legacy Lane,” made possible by a grant from the Polk Arts & Cultural Alliance, is one facet of a larger show in the cancer and research center. “Threads of Hope: A Walk Through Art and Healing” opened on Aug. 29.
The show also features “The Art of Melody” in the Community Gallery. Each piece in this exhibit is also accompanied by a QR code that links to a song chosen by the artist. Van Wieren said viewers, patients in the waiting areas, are able to engage all of the senses: “Not just their eyes, but their ears, and their whole person as they’re looking at this beautiful piece of artwork.”
The on-going exhibit is “a collaboration not just within our own clinical setting, but with the community directly, with the community of artists, with Lakeland Arts Association,” Van Wieren said. “We’re really bringing Lakeland inside the four walls of the cancer center.”
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