Eve Andree Laramee

As an interdisciplinary artist/researcher working at the confluence of art, science and technology, I specialize in the environmental and health impacts of atomic legacy sites. For thirty years my interest in the culture of science has enabled collaborations with physicists, hydrologists, geologists, biogeographers, and ecologists. By sharing innovations, art-and-science collaborations can energize action to initiate positive social change and promote awareness of environmental and health issues by directly involving communities, extending ways in which cultures imagine, create and understand.

My projects investigate water resources contaminated by radioactive isotopes from weapons development and testing, and nuclear waste disposition. Through tracking the invisible traces left behind by the nuclear weapons complex and its “peaceful” dopplegänger, the nuclear energy industry, my work archives our shared atomic legacy.

In 1980 I began zeroing-in on sites where uranium mining/milling, plutonium production for nuclear weapons and the nuclear energy industry have contaminated surface water, well water and deep aquifer water with radioactive isotopes. This contamination is invisible. Radioactive waste is never disposed of, it is dispositioned – placed out of sight and out of mind. Visual art allows for multiple modes of visualizing the invisible; direct action through environmental social-sculpture interventions deployed directly into communities raise environmental awareness, and activate community participation in remediation efforts. Awareness of this spatial history sharpens our ethics and politics in our behaviors and social interactions.