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illustrated) article—which, as we would expect, pulls no punches—in the specialist peer-reviewed journal
Chemistry and Biodiversity.
    But it is not as if acceptance in the art world has been any easier. In a sympathetic essay, the painter and critic Peter Suchin writes that “for one audience Hesse-Honegger’s practice is invalidated by its ‘artistic’ manner, for another it is simply not artistic enough.” In this arena, her work is too assertively realist and too tied to illustration, which, Suchin continues, “many would claim … is not ‘art’ but mere technique, a formulaic manner of record-making, largely devoid of the innovative, critical, and transformative qualities frequently associated with artistic production.” 20
    Cornelia’s unwillingness to respect epistemological boundaries seems to make art critics as uncomfortable as it does scientists. Her paintings insist that it is the boundary itself, rather than its breaching, that is the problem, that science and the visual arts belong together, that their separation is, as Galileo’s vibrant lunar washes make clear, an artifact of the historical slicing of knowledge into ever more specialized and ever less ambitious disciplines. She claims scientific ancestors in Gesner, Merian, and Galileo, all of whom understood that active seeing through paintingand drawing is the basis of scientific inquiry, that the empirical method begins with the artist’s development of a mode of attention grounded in the close observation of nature.
    But vision, perception, and attention are just a part of the story. After the publication of her second
Tages-Anzeiger
article, Cornelia traveled to Sellafield. Because contamination from the reactor there was known to be severe, she expected to find a larger number of damaged insects and deformities more serious than those she found near Aargau. But the difference between the sites was insignificant. Soon after, when she visited Chernobyl, she was appalled by the bleak conditions in which the local population lived, and she was surprised—and awkwardly disappointed—to discover that even there insect life was no more disturbed than in Switzerland. A period of introspection followed, a moment, it seems, of a more profound breaking with the science in which she had been trained at the Institute of Zoology:
    My intention had been to find a scale that would show that there was less damage in places with low radioactivity than in places with high or extremely high levels. I had read about radioactivity, and also about the Petkau Effect, but I didn’t know what to make of the different opinions. Nor could I fall back on scientific inquiries because there were none. Now I was moving into new territory. Sitting gloomily in my rooms in England, I had to admit that my work was still based on the beliefs of scientists in Zürich and on a linear, or proportionate, increase of the effects of radiation. I was the one wearing blinders. I’d been looking for evidence that would confirm my own assumptions. 21

    The solution lay in a return to the principles of concrete art, to its affinity for science as a shared site of rationality, and in particular to its understanding of randomness. Random thinking was something Cornelia had already integrated into her painting practice and her aesthetics. It was a key component of her struggle to allow the insect to be itself rather than merely a vehicle for her artistic expression. Staring gloomily down the lens of her microscope in those rooms in northwest England, she sees the evidence of her observation again and again contradicting the preconceptions she is imposing on the irradiated landscape. She sees contingency at every turn: “Reality is different. Each nuclear power plant emits its own nuclear cocktail. Every landscape with its own characteristic meteorological and topographical conditions reacts differently.In Switzerland, where weather conditions with inversions prevents, or at least