RYERSON UNIVERSITY

Nuclear Crustaceans

Nuclear Crustaceans is a concept designed by Amelia McCarthy Blaine, Elizabeth Wilkes Colleran and Sam Skynner.

The first tube is designed by Amelia McCarthy Blaine. It represents youths imagination and intuition, and the simpler ideas that we had of art as children. When we talked about art that we created in our youth, we reminisced about the types of materials we used, the freedom we felt and the boundlessness of our creativity. Our hands could create anything we could think of.

The middle tube, designed by Sam Skynner, represents our feelings on art that is created in the present day. Due to the nature of today’s global political and environmental climate, we wanted to focus on the feeling of using art to escape reality. Escapism is a method that we thinking greater society’s uses constantly to avoid the feeling of hopelessness and anger people feel about the world, so Sam created a shiny box where one would feel safe, and oblivious to the problems going on outside.

The third tube, designed by Elizabeth Wilkes Colleran, focuses on the future. When discussing as a group, we had a challenging time conceptualizing what the future held and represented artistically. In searching for inspiration, we had a few key fears: nuclear war, global warming, and political upheaval. In researching nuclear impact, Elizabeth stumbled across an article published by the Smithsonian magazine, written by journalist Christopher Crockette, they found that carbon 14 particles from over 500 Cold War nuclear bomb tests laced the deepest parts of the ocean even to this day. What was interesting was that the crustaceans that live in that environment had absorbed the majority of the carbon14 particles through filter feeding, leaving their environment with substantially less nuclear radiation than when they stopped the bomb tests 56 years ago. The tube represents life after devastation. The death and destruction that humans have caused on earth can eventually heal, and although humans might not be a part of this future, that doesn’t mean that it won’t exist.