This drawing is about Dounreay, a decommissioned nuclear plant in Scotland. It’s about contamination and fragmentation and residue. Nuclear catastrophe is one of my earliest memories–I remember Chernobyl and my father explaining the firefighters had gone in knowing they would die horribly. I was six. I already knew about radiation poisoning because I had read (maybe too early) Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. I was privately obsessed with nuclear energy. I couldn’t have articulated it as such, but I read about the atomic bombs in Japan before I was in middle school, and made tiny shrines to the firefighters in Chernobyl that I kept in my bedroom. I was afraid of four things: the sun exploding (because no one would be there to care for our bones); radiation (this extended to nuclear war and power); cowboys; and the devil (how the last two came about I have no idea).
So I’ve been thinking about radiation for a long time. Twenty-four years, I guess. And thinking about contamination more and more in my work. The hardest thing for me about Fukushima is that there will now be, in the middle of this place I love, a dead zone. An uninhabitable place, a poison place. No one will go there. The photographs of Pripyat are horrendous to me. A human wasteland. Testimony to immense loss and immense foolhardiness and, most of all, waste. (You can see photographs of the reactor, people in the area today, and others here as well.) Waste of land, people’s lives, people’s memories, people’s records. Archives–gone. Photographs–gone. Drawings, paintings, musical instruments, scientific instruments, tools, religious artifacts: gone. And radiation contaminating everything that is left: water, ground, crops, plants, wildlife, graves, buildings, roads, toys, books, houses.
It makes me think about what will be left.
What an archaeology 4.5 billion years from now would discover. What will be left in places like Fallujah, where depleted uranium is causing unimaginable birth defects and misery. What fragments will spell out our foolishness and pride and trust and hope (because I do think that these things–nuclear energy–began with the hope and trust that knowledge will lead to beauty) and also our cruelty and short-sightedness and greed.
I think I will never stop thinking about contamination, either in this way (specifically nuclear contamination) or in a more general figurative sense. It is one of the most productive centers of my brain. How things change other things by their presence and how non-contamination is impossible, and also what can be traced of the effects of contamination and of people’s belief in it or refusal of it or fear of it.
I am making this work in part to make myself think outside of my normal patterns (it is not all figural/representative; what is representative is much more realistic than I would usually make). But mostly I am making it to think through the presence of this thing that fascinates and frightens me (nuclear contamination) and to reconcile myself with the fact of it, and to generate ways that I can, privately, work against it.
