Originating with the phrase “Nature is Healing”, which gained popularity as a hashtag during the global COVID-19 lockdown, this installation explores the way many different sites of human absence are heralded as ironic victories of nature’s resilience-nuclear waste sites, de-militarized zones, forests studded with unexploded grenades, contested borders, military training grounds, and sites of extreme pollution. These locations provide the stage for shifting definitions-sickness and health, safety and danger, isolation and abundance, and the complexity of finding the “silver lining” in catastrophe
This project focuses on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation just outside Richland, Washington (not far from the artist’s home in Walla Walla), which produced the plutonium for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, and is now the costliest environmental cleanup in American history. It’s also a wildlife refuge and national park known for its elk populations, cottontail and jackrabbits, and highly prized sagebrush habitat.
Leveraging the material and visual overlap between hospital settings and nuclear control rooms, the project unpacks the idea of “healing” through diagnostic X-rays about radiation poisoning, the bioremediation capacities of sunflowers as get-well balloons, a “green-washed” environment, and silver mylar emergency blankets.
It explores preventative care and quarantine through natural/ unnatural warning systems of danger like the neon-pink spray paint used to tag radioactive rabbits and tumbleweeds or yellow protective leaded glass.
