Responses by Marie Cermakova, art director; Caz Howson, vice president, managing director; Rob Sweetman, chief creative officer; and Bailey Trudgeon, operations manager, ONE23WEST.

Background: One in eight women in Canada will be diagnosed with breast cancer, but in many provinces, people still aren’t eligible for screenings until they’re 50 years of age, even as diagnoses rise among people in their thirties and forties. For Breast Cancer Canada, we had to create something that would spark much needed conversation and action.

Design thinking: The creative idea was to turn the act of waiting, often viewed as passive, into something active and dangerous. We designed the Metastasizing Chair as a grotesque, attention-commanding sculpture that embodied the silent and aggressive spread of untreated breast cancer over a decade. By placing it in familiar but emotionally charged locations, like waiting rooms and busy public spaces, we made the metaphor literal: waiting could kill you.

Challenges: Handling such an emotionally charged subject with the care it deserved while still delivering a message that couldn’t be ignored. Breast cancer is personal, painful and often triggering. From the beginning, we knew that creating something so visceral would evoke strong reactions. Those reactions, including from within our client group and our own team, sparked important and sometimes difficult conversations about tone, sensitivity and how far to push the creative. Balancing emotional impact with respect meant months of thoughtful iteration and collaboration. On a practical level, getting a bold idea like this made within a modest budget required persistence, alignment and a shared commitment to the message we all believed needed to be heard.

Favorite details: This project felt quite abstract from the very beginning, which made it a real challenge to get the look just right. We had to strike a careful balance between medical accuracy and artistic expression to communicate the message effectively.

Visual influences: The visual influence for the Metastasizing Chair was driven by a desire to make the abstract concept of breast cancer metastasis tangible and unsettling. We looked at imagery from the medical and art worlds—particularly those that evoke the uncomfortable, grotesque and urgent nature of cancer’s spread. The chair’s design drew inspiration from the rapid, invasive growth of a tumor, with its distorted, unnatural form emphasizing the consequences of waiting. Ultimately, the goal was to create something visually jarring that would stop people in their tracks and force them to confront the seriousness of early detection.

Specific project demands: We knew we had to get lots of eyes on this piece, particularly to make the government aware. So, we created a physical version of the chairs and placed it right at Parliament Hill.

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