(soft music) - There's a point where you're sculpting and the surface texture, it starts to look real.

You get that kind of creepy feeling like this is starting to get life like enough where you just start to recognize the person you're working on and so then you know like you must have gotten the right form of the wrinkles.

You've got the right like expression in that eye, you know you're, like, on the right path.

(upbeat music) My name is Michaela Calhoun.

I am a certified clinical anaplastologist.

So I am making restorative prosthesis for people who are missing part of their body.

It's a unique type of art because at the end of the day it doesn't work if it doesn't look really natural and blend in.

So you're putting all this time and energy into making this really detailed device and the goal is that a person can put it on and just go out the door and live their life and no one will really see it.

Hopefully you don't notice if you've seen a prosthesis that I made.

Minnesota had, in the 1800s, started to develop a reputation for pioneering advancements in prosthetics.

Where I grew up along the river, it has a very strong history of logging, and then the cities here are known as the big mill town, historically, it's pretty common that there were accidents resulting in limb loss, so that grew the industry.

I am one of 37 certified clinical anaplastologists in the United States.

We work with people for all kinds of reasons.

Children who are born without an ear, for example, adults who have experienced trauma.

A lot of our patients have had cancer.

- My name is Kathy King.

I was diagnosed with a small cell nasal carcinoma, so I needed to have my complete nose removed.

Plastic surgery and noses, you hear about that all the time, you think I'll just get a new one.

Well, that doesn't happen very easily, and my plastic surgeon told me it would take about five years and you'd pretty much look like a teletubby.

You would never look as good as what Michaela can do for you.

- Every prosthesis we make is hand designed and sculpted and painted to match the patient.

So I'm sitting like knee to knee with my patients and painting the detail of their skin color and texture and interacting with them to like get their feedback, make sure that this is gonna be what they want.

- You gonna put a stud, a diamond or something, like a nose ring or anything.

- [Michaela] Let's do it.

- I'm a punker, you know.

- With something like noses, it becomes a little bit more of a difficult process because there can be a lot of like emotional attachments and like cultural meaning to certain features.

You gotta be careful to understand what the patient wants their nose to look like.

- You know, I was there maybe three, four hours at a crack.

So you're sitting there and you're finding out who they are as people.

They're finding out who you are as a person.

They were protecting your dignity.

It makes you be able to live your life as normally as you can and it becomes a part of the new you.

Or I get home, it's like whose nose do you have on today?

(laughing) - A facial deformity is a trope that's used really commonly to sort of indicate a villain or, you know, a bad guy.

To think that it's scary is not a natural response.

It's like a learned response from the imagery in pop culture, we certainly encounter patients who have not looked in the mirror since their anatomy was altered.

When we are able to make a prosthesis that it's really gonna make a difference in someone's life, it's extremely rewarding.

(soft music) - There's a lot of spiritual things associated with eyes, isn't there?

Like the window of the soul and all that.

If I think about it too much, there's a lot of pressure involved, but I always try and focus on the process.

People who aren't familiar with the field don't really understand quite how much art there is to this.

People assume that you could take a photograph and sort of like print it on the eye and it would be fine, but that actually wouldn't work very well and eye is constantly changing.

Yeah, you can't paint an exact copy of the eye as it is at the moment that you're looking at it.

You have to paint sort of a chimera of that will look good in different lighting situations.

And so there's a lot of actual traditional art techniques involved.

So Mari is a patient who first came to me a few years ago now and has decided with her latest prosthesis to go in a different direction.

This is an image that ma had a friend of hers create so that I would have something to work from and to get closer to her idea.

- When I was a junior in undergrad, when I was around 20, I was diagnosed with a rare eye cancer after being blind and that left eye for many years of my life.

When we had my first realistic eye created, it just felt a little off.

And it wasn't because it was prosthetic, but because of my socket and all the surgeries that I went through in treatment.

It just got to a point where I felt like there was always going to be some noticeable difference and I didn't wanna spend the rest of my life chasing to look normal.

I just was like, I'm comfortable with myself.

So I kind of just owned it as part of my identity.

- When I'm making an eye for someone, obviously the primary goal is to try and make it as indistinguishable from their natural eye as I can.

If I was painting a portrait of someone that was going in a gallery, the person I was painting the portrait of wouldn't be standing next to it all the time it's on display.

But the oculus that I make, the thing that you're comparing it to is right there 24/7.

So I have to be very, very precise.

With this project, I can lean into my creativity, I can enjoy the process a lot more.

Just learning how to use gold leaf for this, I have never used gold leaf in an eye before.

- Gold has been part of my life all of my life.

It's very significant in my Somali culture, and so it just naturally made sense that something so personal to me have a gold aspect in that flower.

You know, this is my first non-traditional prosthetic and I hope it's not my last.

I very interested in curious to see how this ocular journey progresses into my adulthood.

For now, I think I am getting to a point where I'm exploring and discovering another side of myself and self expression that I'm just very excited to kind of begin this journey and also have Will be there to, you know, make these visions come to life.

- When I found this career and was able to keep doing things that I love doing, painting, sculpting, creating things with my hands, but in the process, make people feel better about themselves, make people happy, it was the perfect combination for me.

I have artwork in the world, but the person wearing the artwork is the one who's, you know, important.

(soft music)