Atomic Remains

Atomic Remains is a long-term research project exploring methods for working with the discarded content of field sites, landscapes, material histories and the persistence of nuclear violence in cultural and political life. My current inquiry at Trinity, New Mexico, the site of the detonation of the first atomic bomb, begins with what the Cold War left behind: altered landscapes, psychic residues, infrastructural traces, fragments of testimony, and the pull of return. Attuned to material evidence, my approach sides with the quotidian rather than the dazzle of the bomb. From this attention, I am developing a new methodology that reworks Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology for the atomic landscape, taking the bunker as both material form and idea of protection to explore how life persists in landscapes altered by atomic technologies.

As part of Atomic Remains I have a collaborative book in development with co-author Dr. Mary Kavanagh, University of Lethbridge. Entitled Trinity, Returns, the book investigates the persistence of atomic time in two registers: as a durational aesthetic inquiry and as a commentary on atomic tourism and how meaning is made from the afterlife of the atom bomb. The manuscript brings visual archives and lens based images together with interviews and field notes investigating the material evidence of weapons testing, infrastructures of nuclear remediation, and public pedagogies that narrate atomic culture at two key sites of Cold War militarization: the Trinity atomic bomb test site and Project Y, the secret laboratory established by the University of California in Los Alamos to support the Manhattan Project.

In October 2026, I will be spending a month in residency at Greywood Arts, Killeagh, Ireland to work on a critical essay, What the Wind Knows: Art as Early Warning. The writing opens alternative ways of thinking and feeling in response to the material and psychic residues of nuclear science. Taking crisis as both a shared historical condition and an affective experience of late modernity, the essay asks how artistic practice might help us navigate catastrophe without reproducing its paralyzing effects. Rather than interpreting art about disaster, I propose thinking with art: treating it as a mode of encounter that offers models for survival, repair, and relationality after destruction. Engaging closely with Kavanagh’s visual materials, which document the militarized landscape of White Sands Missile Range, the essay argues that art cultivates perceptual and affective capacities needed to remain present with crisis. It is through this mode of attention—learning from shadows, listening to the wind, and tracing what exceeds immediate representation—that new ethical orientations emerge. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s notion of art as an “early warning system,” alongside psychoanalytic accounts of the affective force of symbolization, the essay positions art as a mode of perceptual training attuned to crises that are ongoing, diffuse, or not yet fully articulated. Through play, juxtaposition, and sensory experimentation, art disrupts the spectacle of catastrophe, offering a means of critical attunement to its ongoing effects.