Matchstick Factory

Created in Blender.

This was inspired by the Match Stick Girls Strike in London in 1888. The women in the factories made matches that were made with white phosphorus. The phosphorus was slowly making them sick, disfiguring them, and then it eventually killed them. The women often got “Phossy Jaw”, which caused the jaw and neck to swell and disfigure. I also took inspiration from the Radium Girls-- women in the first world war who painted glow in the dark radium onto clocks, so pilots could see them better. Those women licked their paintbrushes to keep a fine tip for the detailed work, but those women were ingesting radium all day. They were disfigured too, mostly their jaws would disintegrate, and then also die.

In each of those cases, the women were ignored and were made to believe that either nothing was wrong with them, or that they didn’t get sick from working in the factories. My project is trying to take some parts of that, and put them together a bit. I was wanting to show a scene where there had been some disturbance and the women who were forced to work with dangerous materials finally got their hands on a male supervisor, and are about to beat him with one of the radioactive rods. Kind of a “this is killing us, so now I am going to use it to kill you” sort of thing.

Bryant & May was the match company with the first strike. I’ve used their match box designs and have put them in my scene with “Radium Rods” packed in them. The walls have lots of advertisements for products that used to have radium in them, and were promoted to “make you glow”, just like the rods. There are also newspaper clippings with stories of women getting sick and dying from radium poisoning.