The Bra Ball Battle

Emily Duffy's BraBall

When Nicolino decided not to give Emily Duffy his 20,000 bras, she sent out an e-mail plea for bras to her friends. Since January 2001, she's received more than 10,000 bras. Black bras stained with white deoderant, red velvet bras festooned with blace, five-hook bras built for the well-endowed, training bras, stained nursing bras, push-up and padded bras.

And people are still sending in bras, including about 2,000 of one particular Victoria's Secret bra.

The BraBall sculpture is solid bras, except for a "time capsule" of objects in the center. The capusle includes letters from Duffy's best friend's husband, who wrote to friends and family describing his wife's successful battle with breast cancer, paperwork detailing Duffy's struggle with Nicolino over the idea for the ball and one of Duffy's bras.

"I started this project with five of my own bras," she says. "I put one inside the capsule. Then I took a wad of silicon — ironic, isn't it? — and glued the straps of one of my other bras to the outside. From there I started hooking bras together."

Duffy plans to grow her BraBall to 5'4" in diameter — the height of the average American woman.

For women, of women, by women, to women: At 3.5 feet and more than 700 pounds, the ball is at a size where Duffy needs the help of four women. Three push the ball, while Duffy and the other hook bras together and attach the chains. Only women work on the ball. Click the photo to see Duffy stringing bras together.

Bags of special bras: About 700 very unusual bras or those that represent many women are set aside to wrap around the BraBall as the final layer, says Duffy.

Consumer frustration? "There are very few letters in this huge pile of letters I've gotten that say, 'I'm sending you my favorite bra. It's finally dead.' Most of them are letters like, 'You can have this thing. I spent a fortune on it, and it's never fit right." Click the photo to hear Duffy read some of her favorite letters.

Duffy and her sculpture, Mammolith. "Using bras as an art medium — something I've been doing for several years now — is a way of disrupting some of the long-standing taboos surrounding them," says Duffy, a 1993 arts graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.