Works

The story of the modern chemical battery is full of neurotic Italians and loads of dead frogs. Most notably, an experimental feud between Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta defined our earliest understandings of electricity.

 

Galvani believed in “animal electricity” based on an accident he allegedly witnessed with Lucia Galeazzi, his wife. A static spark jumped from the tip of a dissection scalpel to the exposed sciatic nerve of some butchered frog legs the couple was examining. At this moment, the legs kicked as if alive. Galvani, fascinated, dedicated the rest of his life to stringing frog legs together into rudimentary circuits—these creations were lovingly called “frog piles”. He even began wiring the legs to lightning rods during electrical storms to force more power through the legs.

 

Volta was impressed, but didn’t quite believe the phenomenon was unique to living things (as Galvani claimed). Volta set out to prove Galvani wrong by constructing a “frog pile” with no frogs at all. He found that he could create a circuit of electricity by simply placing two different metals together with a saltwater electrolyte in-between. Effectively, this is how modern chemical batteries work. Volta specifically used zinc and copper to prove that electricity could be generated chemically and was not inherently tied to life.

 

Volta’s “voltaic pile” was built to specifically discredit Galvani’s frog pile, however that didn’t stop the fever of electric animal experimentation in the 19th century. Carlo Matteucci invented a highly sensitive device called the frog galvanoscope that measured the presence of voltage. It was 56,000 times more sensitive than other measurers of electricity. It consisted of a frog leg placed in a glass tube with wires connecting to the exposed nerves; when electricity is present, the leg gives a small kick. While extremely sensitive, the frog galvanoscope needs frequent replacing—only working for a day or two before needing a fresh replacement.

 

This piece is a little homage to frogs everywhere for helping us learn to power everything from toys to cars on chemical batteries. It’s entirely self-powered on 8 saltwater copper-zinc battery cells using Volta’s ultimately correct method. 

I began Maddin Creek with an urge to make a deconstructed cave painting. I wanted to parody the idea of a “deconstructed salad,” but with an anthropological phenomenon thousands of years old. I personally found each rock in the piece at Haunted Ridge in Washington County, Missouri. These stones are drusy quartz with agate banding. They absolutely litter the area but cannot be found anywhere else in the world. Nearby Haunted Ridge is the Maddin Creek Site, a paleolithic rock art site with carvings nearly one thousand years old. I lifted a glyph from one of those rocks and copied it onto the calf skin—the quintessential cave art subject—in a shade of yellow unnatural enough to scare the original carver half-to-death. The rocks—usually the substrate of Paleolithic art—now help pull the calf skin taught for the mysterious glyph to be painted on.
 

Everyone is encouraged to touch and feel Maddin Creek (respectfully)! Investigate the quartz rocks with your phone flashlight. We should be able to touch art more often... (20% of proceeds will go to Missouri’s American Indian Heritage Fund).

This is a sculpture based on the radioactive contamination of Coldwater Creek in St. Louis. A large amount of nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project was dumped next to this creek, and over the years, more than 6,000 cases of cancer have been reported along its banks. (disproportionately impacting black people)

 

The clay here is made directly from the radioactive dirt from the riverbank. The nuclear clay (contaminated with uranium, thorium, and plutonium) is then stuck with 6,000 capillary blood collection tubes, with each tube holding a small sample of contaminated water from different places along the river. 

 

Scientists from WashU (my school) were directly involved with the manufacturing of the uranium in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People are still dying (both here in St. Louis and around the world) from America’s atomic legacy.