Future Consciousness (ongoing series of digital collages)

In the mid to late 1980s British Nuclear Fuels Limited produced several black glass discs weighing 0.417 kilograms and measuring 115 millimetres in diameter and 15 millimetres in depth. Public information leaflets that were distributed at that time, featured these objects; declaring that they represented the amount of vitrified high level radioactive waste that would result from an individual’s lifetime use of electricity, domestic and industrial, if it was produced entirely from nuclear energy. Bridget Kennedy is exploring the materiality and social rituals of the nuclear industrial site at Sellafield, Cumbria through this series of digital collages. In an attempt to address what is personally at stake in acknowledging Donna Harraway’s declaration: “I was born kin to PU239” (Harraway, 1997), she draws on heterodox methods of self-exploration and attunement with place such as scrying, tarot and dowsing. By combining documentation of performative actions with archival imagery she attempts to make images that think with vitrified high level nuclear waste and offer up alternative modes of expression for nuclear future scenarios.