Between 1951 and 1992, over one thousand nuclear tests were detonated in the Nevada desert. My ancestors lived and worked on a dairy farm and drank milk from cows that grazed on land contaminated by nuclear fallout. Two of my great-uncles died of myeloid leukemia, a cancer with known ties to nuclear testing. The impacts of nuclear harm echo for generations, provoking detriments to our health, socioeconomic displacement, environmental contamination, and cultural and psychological trauma. This series explores where the body meets the land and the challenge of truth-telling in a community of secret-keepers. I question how historical events reverberate in the present day and how learning about our ancestors and their connection to the land provides opportunities for healing.

Using family photographs, I create portraits on glass milk jars with liquid light by applying silver-gelatin emulsion directly to the surface and developing each piece by hand in the darkroom. This materially fragile process allows the image to emerge through physical contact with archival images, chemistry, and time. I work with 19th-century photographic processes to reflect on how histories persist, recur, and resurface, embedding the past materially within the present. The portraits refer to campaigns from the 1980s that featured images of missing people on milk cartons. Although the campaign was largely unsuccessful, it left a mark on our collective memory.

Through a fusion of personal archive, political history, and experimental process, Dairy for the Downwinders examines the intergenerational health, memory, and cultural consequences of nuclear fallout. It presents this work as part of a broader national legacy that remains unresolved, even as renewed attention to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act underscores the continuing scale and urgency of nuclear harm.

PROJECT AND MEDIUM INFORMATION

Liquid light (darkroom process) portraits on 34 Milk Jars, 8.6” x 3.4” x 3.4” each; photographs from family archives reprinted as archival pigment prints in vintage frames (2”x3”-5”x7”) adorned with hand-made beads made from cow's milk; paper milk jugs with the name and date of every atmospheric nuclear test detonated in the U.S. written in UV ink.