WORK > HANFORD REACH INSTALLATION

HANFORD REACH explores themes of denial, the contested nature of truth, and the manner in which personal life histories are embedded within the dynamics of state power. It presents a space to counteract historic legacies of silence and secrecy, offering a chance to listen as quite disparate individual narratives resonate, reflect, and sometimes, collide.

Mural scale photos and a floor video projection sequence frame a sound piece that is played in surround. In this sound collage, excerpts from an archive of original first-person narratives are juxtaposed, to reflect the complexity of individual and collective memory.

The interview archive, recorded over the course of a decade, includes conversations with Hanford scientists and engineers, indigenous elders, displaced pioneer descendant farmers, farm-worker advocates, downwinders, and an hibakusha: a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. I am deeply thankful to everyone who offered their voice to this work.

Thanks to my creative collaborators:
Michael Paulus Videography
Jon Leidecker Sound Design
Thanks to Kathleen Flenniken for permission to include her poem "Plume"
Thanks to Phillip Mudd for collaborative animation
Thanks to Puffin Foundation and Puffin Foundation West for support in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2021


Built in eastern Washington State by the Manhattan Project in World War Two, Hanford site created plutonium for the Trinity Test in New Mexico, for the Fat Man bomb dropped upon the city of Nagasaki on August 9th 1945, and through four decades of the Cold War, Hanford created the lion's share of plutonium in the US nuclear arsenal. The vast area encompasses a decommissioned nuclear reactor reimagined as a museum, multiple reactors in various stages of demolition, entombment, preservation, and active production; abandoned pioneer townships and orchards, and Native American sacred ancestral sites. Toxic chemical plumes are slowly snaking from Hanford's "tank farms" toward the adjacent Columbia River. The site contains a plutonium-contaminated region that will remain a no-go-zone in perpetuity.

The installation Hanford Reach is named for part of the nuclear terrain that was restricted from public access for four decades, then reopened as a nature reserve.