Cornelia Hesse-Honegger

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Cornelia Hesse-Honegger (born November 29, 1944 in Zurich ) is a Swiss natural science illustrator, visual and “knowledge artist ”: Her insect pictures are exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. She moves in the border area between art and science and wants to present insects as evidence of a beautiful and at the same time threatened world.

Life

Cornelia Hesse-Honegger is the daughter of Warja Lavater and Gottfried Honegger . For 25 years she worked for the Zoological Institute of the University of Zurich .

Artistic and scientific work

Cinnamon bug (Corizus hyoscyami)

From 1967 Cornelia Hesse-Honegger painted mutated fruit and houseflies that had been poisoned in the laboratory or irradiated to produce mutations . For her, they became “prototypes, visions of a future man-made natural form. In 1968 I painted the first bug (Heteroptera) because I thought it was so beautiful. "

Since these first encounters with insects and the artistic engagement with them, she collected and painted them in different biotopes . One year after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster , in 1987, she began to systematically collect bedbugs: in areas radioactively contaminated by the Chernobyl fallout and in the vicinity of nuclear facilities . The collected over 16,000 insects she examined using binocular - magnifying glasses . She differentiated between “ morphological ” and “all damage”: The morphological damage included deformations on the body such as wings of unequal length , missing segments or shortening in antennae , fused or deformed abdominal segments , asymmetrical thorax or changes in legs and feet.

In the “All damage” category, she documented morphological damage as well as dark spots, pigment changes , holes and material malformations ( chitin ). According to their statements, the damage rate in all examined areas is 22 percent for “morphological damage” and zero percent for “all damage”. In order to be able to compare the damage, she collected 50 or 65 bedbugs in intact biotopes per investigation site and anesthetized them for the external investigation.

From 1968 to 1989 she lived near Zurich and collected bedbugs there, as well as in Ghana and Costa Rica . She used these intact biotopes as reference biotopes as there was no morphological damage to the bug. During the field studies, she creates color sketches , which she later turns into meticulous watercolors in the studio .

Through her investigations she came to the conclusion that the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl in Sweden and Switzerland had caused morphological damage to bed bugs, fruit flies ( Drosophila ) and plants. The statements in their 1988 publication were criticized by natural scientists : The radioactive substances released by the reactor disaster produced too low doses in Western Europe to be able to cause morphological damage to insects.

Because Swiss nuclear power plants emitted lower artificial radioactivity doses than the Chernobyl fallout, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger concluded that Heteroptera in the vicinity of Swiss nuclear power plants must be healthy. In 1988 she examined bugs and plants in the vicinity of Swiss nuclear power plants and international nuclear facilities such as Sellafield (England), La Hague (France), Krümmel and Gundremmingen in Germany, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant ( Nevada ) and the Hanford nuclear test site in the USA . Based on these studies, she concluded that “normally functioning” nuclear power plants , processing and other nuclear facilities caused morphological damage to bedbugs as a result of low radiation .

According to Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, the field studies in Switzerland, Europe and the USA suggest that the artificial radioactivity that gets into the environment through atomic plants represents a serious and neglected danger to humans and the environment. She works to ensure that this problem is recognized and independently investigated and that alternatives to nuclear energy are sought. In their opinion, depleted uranium ammunition , such as that used in Kosovo and Iraq, must be banned for good, and the affected population must be examined and cared for.

According to her own statements, she is touched and fascinated by working with bedbugs and sees them as a contribution to the effort to preserve nature.

Awards

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cornelia Hesse-Honegger - Heteroptera - Images of a mutating world. Portrait on the website of the traveling exhibition recommended for imitation! expeditions in aesthetics and sustainability (since 2009). Retrieved January 30, 2016.
  2. ↑ wissenskunst.ch ( Memento from October 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Deutschlandfunk.de , January 29, 2016, Christine Nagel: Die Wissenskünstlerin Cornelia Hesse-Honegger , manuscript , p. 22.
personal data
SURNAME Hesse-Honegger, Cornelia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss painter
DATE OF BIRTH November 29, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich