'Blueprints for a Caesium 137 Landscape' are a series of Giclee and unfixed cyanotype photographic works responding to Kathleen’s research into the colour Prussian Blue and her interest in the landscape as a socially constructed space with its own social political history.
Through her research and conversation with chemist Dr Mike Ware, Kathleen discovered that Prussian Blue is used as an antidote to radiation poisoning and specifically it was used in the UK after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to help prevent Caesium 137 entering the food chain.
After Chernobyl radioactive rain fell onto the UK uplands contaminating the soil and grass. To help prevent the transfer of these radioactive heavy metals into the food chain the UK government needed a discreet and effective solution to resolve this issue. Spraying Prussian Blue onto the landscape or mixing it into the soil was not seen as a workable solution as it would react with UV light creating a blue landscape. After extensive testing Prussian Blue was administered to livestock within these affected areas.
Prussian blue's unique lattice shaped structure allowed the radioactive heavy metals ingested by the livestock to get trapped inside its chemical structure. The insolubility of the chemical meant that the Prussian Blue with the captured radioactive isotopes inside its structure were excreted out of the sheep and cattle, reducing radiation levels in these livestock and helping to prevent them being passed along the food chain.
Using archival press photographs from the destroyed Nuclear reactor at Chernobyl and images from the UK uplands Kathleen has collaged these two landscapes together to create fragmented and abstracted views of the spaces. Using collage Kathleen controls what is brought to the surface and what is hidden beneath. What is ephemeral becomes enduring and what is fixed becomes fleeting. These images are produced as Giclee prints onto two fragments of paper, which are pinned onto a watercolour paper coated in a cyanotype sensitising solution. The cyanotype colour has not been fixed by washing it out in water, instead it has been left to continually react to the UV light in daylight and it will keep turning a deeper blue with the more UV light it absorbs. This living photograph at some unknown stage will reach its maximum absorption of UV light and the colour blue cannot get any darker.
