Visual Communication and Toxic Waste: Signaling Danger Over Many Millennia

• Main Author: Hedlund, Audrey
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Scholarship @ Claremont 2022
• Subjects: visual communication; toxic waste; Waste Isolation Pilot Plant; Giant Mine; Icons and symbols; pollution; colonialism; American Art and Architecture; American Studies; Arts and Humanities; Canadian History; Digital Humanities; Indigenous Studies; Native American Studies; Oral History; United States History; Canada; Yellowknife
• Online Access: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1808; https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3020&context=scripps_theses

This paper examines two toxic waste sites in North America, The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico and Giant Mine in Yellowknife, Canada. These sites will remain toxic for hundreds of thousands of years and pose a threat to current and future residents' health and safety. Thus, this paper seeks to explore how current generations might communicate such dangers to future generations while also acknowledging the colonial past and present of these sites. The author touches on various proposals of visual communication methods as well as culturally rooted communal solutions such as the willful participation of Indigenous communities from these sites. The author argues that the most effective and just solution will consist of both strategies in order to solve the issue of perpetual care at WIPP and Giant mine as well as offering a framework for other sites across the globe to follow. Note: This thesis was accompanied by several prints that reflected the author/artist's thought process in ideating and solving these complex issues that are not currently available for viewing.