Artist39: Cornelia Hesse-Honegger

I found Cornelia Hesse-Honegger while checking out Ernst Haeckel's work. Similar to Haeckel, she has spent her career cataloging various subjects in vivid, colorful visual detail. She goes to specific regions, collecting specimens to be examined and recorded in her images.

She's studied specimens in South Vietnam, Gundremmingen, Chernobyl, Switzerland, and the United States since the first half 20th century. What makes her work stand out, aside from the meticulous visual detail, is the places, times, and changes she's chosen to represent through her images. All of her work studies changes in insects in areas of high radiation, whether from nuclear blasts or power plants or specimens from laboratories where creatures were subjected to controlled mutation. She tracks the minute outward physical changes caused by the mutations in her images.

I want to create the same relevance in my work; to say something important and relevant in a simple, beautiful way.