Cornelia Hesse-Honegger

Cornelia Hesse-Honegger (born 1944, Zurich, Switzerland) [1] is a Swiss illustrator, watercolor painter and photographer whose work focuses on the intersection between art and science, zeroing in on the mutagenic effects of radiation on insects.

[2] Her work and research took her to eastern Sweden in 1987, which was highly affected by the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl, where she continued to paint mutated insects.

The New York Times writer, Phillip Hoare wrote: Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, [is] a contemporary artist dedicated to creating near-perfect watercolors of insects deformed by nuclear fallout.

This is sci-fi stuff: flies with legs growing out of their eyes, the kind of mutations that in any other animal would elicit our horrified response, yet which, because they occur in such small creatures, seem almost excusable because almost invisible.

In the act of depicting them so exactingly, Hesse-Honegger, whose own child, we are told in an upsetting aside, was born with a club foot, “discovers that the insect is deformed in ways she hadn’t noticed before.” Her aesthetic is that of concrete art, isolated images placed in a grid; her intent is a silent rebuke, a solemn challenge to a world that, even now, is turning again to nuclear power to solve its problems.