Featuring Uranotypes and Palladium photographs
Exhibition opens for viewing from the 29th January 2025 to 6th April 2025
Offical opening celebration Sunday 2nd February 2 pm til 5 pm
Opening speech at 2.30 pm by Professor Gale Spring followed by a floor talk by Jesse Andrewartha
ARTIST STATEMENT:
“Transmutations: Visualizing Matter | Materializing Vision” is a multi-media exhibition exploring the history, legacy and radioactivity of uranium mining during the Cold War in Canada and the US. Captured over the course of three years in palladiotype, uranotype and 35mm motion picture film, I traveled from the sub-Arctic regions of Canada to the uranium mines of southern Utah and the Navajo Nation to document the lives impacted by uranium; ex-miners that toiled decades underground, Indigenous leaders and activists leading the charge to clean up the mines and the places that shifted the balance of power on a global scale.
Radiation cannot be perceived by our own senses. Photography is the only medium that makes it visible. Upon placing radioactive uranium ore directly on film, the ionizing radiation exposes it as if it were visible light. The resulting images, autoradiograms, reveal the radiation as an aura through and around the mineral matrix. Using historically significant samples of uranium ore extracted from famous mines of the mid-20th century, “Transmutations” features a series of autoradiograms printed using uranotype: an historical photographic process made with hand- coated, photosensitive uranium salts. The resulting prints, comprised of the uranium metal itself, create a permanent, radioactive image; a vibrant index of the specimen photographed that no current digital technology can replicate.
The photographs provide audiences an image of material vibrancy, their stories providing a better understanding of our connection to the power of uranium, its history and impact on this planet and its inhabitants, raising the issues of environmental degradation and renewed extraction of nuclear materials.
Each print in the exhibition is part of a limited edition on hand-made on specialized papers designed for alternative photographic processes, framed using archival matte board. The uranotype prints are safe; there is no hazard to the audience or staff from normal viewing or handling of the framed images.
Click the following link for an artist talk made at an exhibition in Vancouver, Canada in May 2022: https:// vimeo.com/711020879.
More Information www.transmutationsproject.com
