The Gates Foundation approached me to create an artwork depicting Edward Jenner’s tale of the first smallpox vaccine. The enormity of the challenge quickly dawned upon me as Small Pox killed over 500 million people, from the nobility down to the poorest of the poor, not one person was exempt from it’s horrific grasp. Here we see the physician Edward Jenner inoculating James Phipps which became the first vaccine ever administered. The flower motif represents the disease itself, smallpox was referred to as “heavenly flowers” by the Chinese, the blooming of the pox mark on one’s body indicated your fate.