Heteroptera: The Beautiful and the Other or Images of A Mutating World

by Cornelia Hesse-Honegger
2001, Scalo: Zurich
301 pp., illus. b/w & col.
ISBN 3-908247-31-4

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell

pepperell@ntlword.com

Cornelia Hesse-Honegger is a scientific illustrator who paints exquisite watercolours of insects and other wildlife. This in itself would not be remarkable but for the fact that since 1987 she has been documenting the genetic mutations in life forms taken from the vicinity of nuclear facilities and in regions contaminated by radioactive fallout. Her forensic technique dispassionately presents minute creatures in vivid and seductive detail. But at the same time one is disturbed and moved by the various distortions, growths and asymmetries displayed by these specimens carefully collected on her expeditions to sites affected by nuclear contamination, including Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and many parts of western Europe.

The book is densely illustrated with immaculate images, interleaved with the narrative of her professional life and her persistent attempts to bring to the attention of the scientific community the effects of radioactivity on the natural world. For much of the time her concerns were not taken seriously by zoologists, nor were her paintings given any credence as evidential data – being regarded as too aesthetically driven and emotive. Coincidently, the artistic community had largely rejected her work as purely illustrative and lacking any creative content. Yet despite this, she stoically pursued her project and has more recently gained wider attention and sympathy for her cause.

Looking at the images, and marvelling at the endeavour they embody, one wonders why in an age of high-speed, high-resolution photography there is any demand for this painstaking craft, particularly as it typically takes several weeks or months of precise observation and relentless labour to produce an image that could be taken by a camera in a split second. This is all the more extraordinary when one realises that many of the subjects are not dead or anaesthetized, but wriggly around under a microscope or swimming in a tank. But Hesse-Honegger explains that very procedure of close and repeated looking is in itself a kind of method of scientific discovery. Through such observation, one comes to know the subject in a way that the almost instant process of photography doesn’t necessitate, revealing subtleties and nuances that might otherwise be overlooked. Talking of previous scientific illustrators she writes:

"I am convinced that scientific drawings and paintings were very often ‘precognitive’ pictures rather than illustrations – the actual scientific research process took place during and through the picture-making. For these scientists the pictorial process was a way of achieving knowledge." (p. 7)

With its combination of personal testimony, compelling images and superb production, Heteroptera is the striking culmination of a valuable life’s work. It offers a quiet and insightful line of argument in the sometimes overblown debates about the disparity between art and science. Hesse-Honegger’s work demonstrates that, at their best, each advances human knowledge by combining rigorous examination with compassionate purpose.