𝘓𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘈𝘣𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘰𝘯 

2025- current research

Nuclear energy is experiencing a global ‘renaissance’ as a net-zero, clean solution to our climate crisis. In response, countries globally have pledged to triple nuclear production by 2050, however its afterlife remains a profound oversight: nuclear waste. The half-life of Uranium-238— the primary element in high-level waste—is 4.5 billion years, a geological timescale that exceeds human comprehension yet defines the long-term risks of nuclear expansion.

In 2025, the Nuclear Waste Management of Canada (NWMO) launched an online campaign titled #didyouknow featuring brightly animated videos designed to assuage public anxieties about nuclear waste: “Despite how it is depicted in some comic books and movies, used nuclear fuel in Canada is not a liquid or a gas. It’s a stable solid — actually, a ceramic” (NWMO, 2025).

The NWMO campaign mobilizes the perceived solidity of ceramic as a technology of reassurance (Masco, 2006). Ceramics are enduring; to hold a clay artifact is to touch some of the earliest traces of human culture; to work with clay is to engage a material that carries geological memory into our planetary future. However, ceramics are also inherently fragile. I will work within this same convergence of ceramics and nuclear waste not to stabilize public anxieties, but to unsettle them—exposing the material and temporal instabilities at stake in nuclear developments unfolding in Canada and beyond.

Canada, is simultaneously pursuing two controversial waste management projects: a Near Surface Disposal Site near the Ottawa River, and a Deep Geological Repository in Wabigoon Ojibway Lake Nation. These projects expose deep social, political, and ethical fissures around what constitutes waste, whose lands and bodies can be “abandoned,” and how responsibility can be sustained across vast spans of time.

I  employ clay, which is literally our ground, as both substance and language for mapping Canada’s nuclear responsibility. Through digital engraving I  inscribe my research of nuclear waste transportation routes, accident sites, and contamination zones onto ceramic tiles, mapping the land upon itself and transforming data into tactile, material knowledge.

stoneware ceramic tiles, engraving of Canada’s interim storage sites for used nuclear fuel (bottom), Watershed map of Deep Geological Repository Area (top), 2026. Both maps sourced from We the Nuclear Free North. 

https://wethenuclearfreenorth.ca/nuclear-waste-abandonment/ 


The creation of this work was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec