motherboxing:

watercolourstorm:

motherboxing:

bogleech:

strangebiology:

>Industrial waste pollutes water
>Filter feeders process waste and store toxins in their bodies
>People harvest shells for art
>Artist suffers from exposure to toxic materials, suffers for years with debilitating mental and physical symptoms. 

She will NEVER recover.

People act like environmental pollution is always something happening “somewhere else” but we’re all breathing and eating and drinking it and it should really put some shit into perspective that just having a hobby around seashells turned this woman’s household dust into a death trap.

“Hobby” ?????

oh wow i didn’t even catch that (wasn’t reading the reblogs as carefully as i should have been). 

Gillian Genser’s art is incredibly intricate, time consuming (she spent 15 years on these sculptures, often working on them up to 12 hours a day) and evocative. She gave years of her life and sacrificed her health to make these sculptures, working on them even after she became ill. It’s not a hobby around seashells, and characterizing it that way is a disservice to the incredible work this artist has put into her craft.

She writes, I’ve experienced the suffering of so many creatures trapped in their polluted habitats. I now hope their voices can be heard—that my art might create a sense of awe, a sense of connectivity and reverence for the natural world.

 I often think of Beethoven, who suffered from lead poisoning; he lost his hearing and producing his work became an angry struggle. In the end, he had to create his music from the memory of sound. I was creating my art from the memory of joy. When I look at Adam, I feel grief—both for myself and our planet. But I also feel satisfaction because he is magnificent. That’s how I find my hope. I call him my beautiful death.

This is a really good clarification and I’m glad you wrote it!

I’d also like to add that the dust produced by grinding down shells is not “household dust”. There are many artistic practices/fields that involve working with hazardous dust (for example, ceramicists need to take precautions against silicosis, an incurable, potentially fatal condition caused by inhaling ceramic dust which contains tiny tiny glass shards). Artists like Genser are aware of this; this woman is someone who went to work aware of these risks, took the workplace precautions she believed were necessary according to the accepted standards of her field, and is dying because those standard precautions (which countless artists in numerous fields rely on! Seashells are just one material artists use that comes from the earth!) are no longer adequate due to environmental degradation. Framing this as a “hobby around seashells” that produced toxic “household dust” not only is a condescending, minimizing, and frankly misogynistic way of talking about an extremely accomplished creative professional, it undersells the nature of this problem on a larger scale; this is a workplace hazard for many, many people, and it is directly tied to workers rights and safety.

My beautiful death