Cornelia Hesse-Honegger

Cornelia Born 1944 in Zürich, Switzerland, worked as scientific illustrator for the University of Zürich for 25 years. Illustrations of Drosophila flies, wild forms and mutated until 1985. From 1969 on she discovered and started to paint true bugs (Heteroptera) and parts of flies (Diptera) developing her artistic work. After the accident of Chernobyl, she began her own field studies in Chernobyl fallout areas: In summer 1987 in Sweden and Switzerland, and since then in self-financed field studies around nuclear installations in Europe and USA. Collecting in her field studies 17.000 true bugs, her focus is on normally functioning nuclear power plants and nuclear reprocessing plants. Her studies show that widely accepted ionizing radiation emissions of nuclear plants cause terrible deformation to true bugs and other insects. Her watercolors of insects and research reports give testimony of our treatment of nature and ourselves, human beings. Her art poses the question of whether our official scientific endeavors and their technological implementation are, together with other problems, at the heart of our environmental catastrophe.