Face to Face With Prosthetic Sculpture

Kaylee Dougherty is a board-certified ocularist and a clinically certified anaplastologist. She is also a classically trained sculptor who earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Boston University in 2011.

Two years later, she joined Boston Ocular Prosthetics; she currently serves on the board of directors for the Board of Certification in Anaplastology.

Facial prosthetics are the ultimate in commissioned artwork, but the procedure is typically meant to go unnoticed by anyone other than the person for whom it was created.

Here is a conversation with Dougherty. The complete interview can be found here.

“A lot of what I’m doing is basically hyperrealist sculptures, so I do everything on the face, eyes, ears, noses, orbital, hemifacials,” Dougherty says. “Each piece is custom-made for each patient.”

Dougherty says that much of medicine is a combination of art and science. In her field, they intersect. Facial prosthetics is the natural progression of what she has enjoyed since she was a child.

“I wanted to be a sculptor when I was 7, so that’s been all I’ve ever wanted to do,” she says. “I went to school for sculpture at Boston University, and all of my focus was on portrait work and life-size figures.

“Now I do the same. It’s just parts of the portrait instead of the entire thing at any given time.”

While the outward appearances of the prosthetics are important, they also must help the recipient with typical functions, Dougherty says. The nose and ears, for example, help people hold their glasses and masks in place. The ears have an important function
in directing sound.

“I look at my process as the design process, so when I’m creating these products they are for my patients,” Dougherty says. “They need to be something that they can wear, that they can live with, that can meld right into their day-to-day life.”

She also designs prosthetics to give control back to her patients.

“Just by virtue of existing, and missing an eye or missing a nose, that does not mean that now you need to become this poster person for that existence,” Dougherty says. “If I get to sculpt and do something that I love to do and it’s helping someone else, then that’s wonderful.

“I prefer that the work that I do is not what’s front and center,” she laughs. “I want it to just support them to then live their lives the way that they choose to.”