Author: Stella Greenhill | Major: Studio Art – Printmaking | Semester: Spring 2024
Gods in the Nuclear Age – Gallery Opening
Spring 2024 has seen me pursue the second half of my research, namely, the studio practice portion. In completing an Honors degree in the arts, my thesis culminated in a gallery exhibition of original artworks. My research concerns the story of the Trinity tests and the city of Los Alamos that was created to support the scientists and personnel for the duration of The Manhattan Project. I am interested in serving as an emotional archivist for the lives of those involved, as well as using the language of Christian belief to add narrative texture and depth to the stories.
The first semester that I received funding was spent doing field research as well as academic inquiry. The intent of the research was to gain a level of understanding that would allow me to produce new content within the same themes and with a sensitivity to the atmosphere of the story that I have been tracking. In that portion, I read firsthand accounts as well as biographies about those involved in addition to sending myself to New Mexico to experience the landscape directly. This semester was devoted to the organization of this research and experience as well as the actual development and production of the aforementioned art pieces.
This body of work and its culminating gallery chart a connected web in which human greed is a motivator that wars with the intrinsic human desires for cooperation and caretaking. It documents the literal landscape that these events took place in and the ways in which they were desecrated or otherwise bastardized by the construction of atomic weaponry that took place. The conversation I am having around landscape, the human hand, and our role as instigators of history is carried out in a white-walled art space engineered to mimic the interior of a chapel. It provides a space for the contemplation of legacy and a moment of human connection with those who have come before us. My account differs from the common cold retellings of the same story that emphasize only the acquisition of power – and it is the warmth included in mine that allows for critical consideration of the human elements that get overlooked in other narratives. This kind of storytelling is essential. To borrow a line from my thesis paper: “The preservation of the human has to be the central focus of artistic recounting, and this thesis endeavors to show that.”
The greatest challenge with this body of work was finding a way to create art that accurately uses the influences that I am drawing from while still aligning visually with my personal artistic voice. The work I was making for this project felt very disconnected from who I was as an artist at first which was, in some ways, part of what drew me to the subject. I have a desire for hard research that my art practice doesn’t always feed, and I wanted to push myself to marry the two. This was something that my mentor did a lot to assist with. Alongside other faculty, she helped me understand how I still had a place in the work and how this project aligns with my ongoing fascination with human legacy and mythology.
This body of work would have been impossible without the generous support from the Honors College at UARK. It was thanks to this grant that I was able to travel to support my research, take the time to create, and afford the materials necessary.