Untitled - Homage to Robert Adams' Our Lives and Our Children: Photographs Taken near the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant

This sculptural installation is homage to Robert Adams’s Our Lives and Our Children: Photographs Taken Near the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant (1983). The photo inspiration depicts a young mother and child in an unremarkable domestic moment. The scene is quiet and familiar, but Adams frames the image within the proximity of the Rocky Flats plant. Ordinary life unfolds alongside an unseen presence, and an implied threat lingers beyond the frame.

In the photobook’s foreword, Adams notes, “the individuals shown were within hazardous proximity of the Rocky Flats Plant. Their peril is representative, however, of a wider threat to all of us from nuclear weapons, one that continues in different forms to this day.”

The work is constructed from steel wool, a commonplace household material used to scrub stubborn grime and also used at the Rocky Flats plant. By translating Adams’s photograph into this ubiquitous material, Untitled brings together the domestic and the industrial, reflecting on how extraordinary risk can remain embedded in ordinary life and how the legacy of Rocky Flats, and the nuclear age more broadly, persists quietly in everyday life.