the Venice Biennale. The following year she moved to Paris where she became friends with the art critic and founder of the Nouveau Réalisme movement, Pierre Restany. Back in Paris, Szapocznikow started to produce casts of her breasts, stomach, and legs. Working mainly in bronze and stone, Szapocznikow's early artistic production constitutes the first materially documented trace of her own embodiment. In 1963, the artist began to combine fragmented body parts with revolutionary sculpting materials including polyester and polyurethane. Such technical innovation allowed Szapocznikow to immortalize a personal language informed by her exposure to death in childhood, traumatic memories of the Holocaust, as well as witnessing the premature collapse of her own body due to tuberculosis. Death In 1968, the artist was diagnosed with breast cancer. Much of her work after her diagnosis, revolved around her inevitable death and the traumas she endured throughout her life. That same year Szapocznikow started making her "tumor" sculptures using resin, gauze, crumpled newspapers and photographs. Through casts of the human body, the artist intended to preserve the impermanence of the body as a source of pain, trauma and truth. Her choice of using photographs of herself and of friends in forms of synthetic resin calls upon the processes of sculpture and photography as grave diggers and carriers of melancholy. One of the last works that Szapocznikow worked on was a purely conceptual project. Encouraged by Pierre Restany, she explored a design that would celebrate and beautify the region of Vesuvius. A paradoxical production, it involved not the crown of Vesuvius but the inside of the crater itself. There was to be a skating rink – inviting skaters to waltz to On the Hills of Manchuria, lighting, ski-lifts, and artificial snow. The design can be described as "the gesture of someone who, in challenging nature, subjugates and enchants it" and the "triviality and the playful character of that gesture." The artists herself comments on the inevitability of the end with the conceptual project: "If one day during a figure skating competition some Peggy Fleming of the time executes her program in the frozen crater and if we, the spectators, amazed by her wonderful and frivolous pirouettes, are surprised by a sudden eruption of lava and become petrified for ever, like the inhabitants of Pompeii, then the triumph of the moment and of the force of transition will be complete. And such a fleeting moment