Big Mammo is among the most intimate and emotionally resonant works in Sugiura's X-Ray series. Created as part of the artist's renewed engagement with archival medical imagery during the Covid-19 pandemic, the work is based on an enlarged mammogram presenting the profile of a woman's breast. A delicate network of veins, tissues, and internal structures emerges from the image, revealing a hidden landscape that is at once anatomical and unexpectedly poetic. What initially appears lyrical and almost abstract is continually brought back to its medical reality through the inclusion of smaller diagnostic views, reminding the viewer of the image's clinical origin.

The work stems from Sugiura's long-standing fascination with X-ray imagery, which began following a collapsed lung in the early 1990s. During the pandemic, while revisiting decades of unused X-ray films preserved in her studio, she found new relevance in these materials. Created at a moment when questions of health, vulnerability, and survival had become collective concerns, Big Mammo transforms a diagnostic image into a meditation on care, uncertainty, and resilience.

For Sugiura, the work also reflects a profoundly shared human experience. As she has noted, mammograms are a procedure that countless women undergo, each hoping for a reassuring result. The image therefore carries a dual charge: it is both a medical document associated with anxiety and anticipation, and a celebration of the body's complexity and beauty.

By pairing the mammographic image with a vibrant field of color, Sugiura introduces a note of optimism and renewal. The work embodies a central theme of her later practice: the coexistence of vulnerability and hope. As the artist has remarked, "When you see color, there's light. Where there's light, there's life." Rather than concealing the realities of illness, aging, or mortality, Big Mammo confronts them directly, transforming a clinical image into a reflection on survival, healing, and the enduring vitality of the human body.

At once personal and universal, scientific and poetic, Big Mammo demonstrates Sugiura's unique capacity to locate beauty in places where it is rarely sought, revealing the hidden structures of life through the language of photography.