The Eisenhouer-era “Atoms for Peace” program had both successful and failed attempts to familiarize Americans with the benefits of nuclear energy, a campaign that was necessary after the horrific power the bomb had shown to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Since then, atomic energy has been an undercurrent to both American’s image of its “glorious past” – 50s housewives, picket fences, and the nuclear family – and the uncertain future: expansive wastelands, poisoned land, and mutations.

Mutations are the blunt tools of evolution. They are the random and unpredictable genetic changes that lead to new traits. Whether those traits are helpful, harmful, or neither is equally random and unaccountable. Natural mutation has no goal in and of itself, it is the provenance of chance.

Atomic Garden is a splicing of the nervous undercurrent around nuclear power, and the mutation potential in every life. Text is taken from multiple sources exploring the atomic gardening program, and from informational publications about the mutations that lead to Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. This neurological disorder is manifest in the artist as a random genetic mutation, affecting the motor coordination in hands and feet. Like the plants subject to cobalt-60 radiation, there is no family history of the mutation, and while it can cause obvious physical changes, both plants are artist are still able to grow.

This experimentation with life is the subject of this book – a look at the methodology, both human and natural, that leads to change; a frightening concept and a door to the unknown. Genetic change especially has the potential to be fatal, but hand-in-hand with that potential there is also the opportunity for life in every new pairing of adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine.

Print One: Oxeye Daisy, Leucanthemum vulgare
Print Two: Outline of an Atomic Garden, from above
Print Three: Todd’s Mitcham Peppermint, mentha x piperita
Print Four: Diagram of Human DNA Strand, from above
Print Five: Rio Star Grapefruit, Citrus × paradisi

Letterpress and linocut on handmade seed paper.
Printed and bound by Allison Fischbach.
Bear Bones Books, 2018.
Edition of 6.