Julianna Joos: Les Mutant (Etching and Aquatint)

Julianna Joos is a professional artist from Montreal. She is a printmaker, weaver, and professor at Dawson College. With more than 40 years of experience as a printmaker, she has created etchings, woodcuts and digital prints, digital fibre printing, and wearable art.

This series of twelve etchings on copper deal with the aftermath of nuclear disasters. These prints are about the mutant butterflies, found around Fukushima, two months after the nuclear accident in March 2011. 

The small blue butterflies of the zizeera male species have been exposed to radioactivity as larvae; they have developed visible physical deformities. These anomalies have not disappeared with the following generation instead they have worsened.  This would demonstrate that the radiations from the nuclear accident at Fukushima have clearly damaged the genes themselves of the blue butterfly. Julianna’s poetic artistic approach to the situation is made in an effort to make this dramatic consequence of the nuclear accident known.