Archival Art Print of "Gestation" by Aurora Levins Morales

About The Work My parents began farming the land I now live on in 1952, using all the pesticides that were being heavily promoted to post-war farmers in Puerto Rico and many other places. Dieldrin can cross the placental barrier, exposing a developing fetus to neurotoxins that attack GABA receptors in the brain. This many-layered image shows my mother pregnant with me in late 1953, and my father working the vegetable beds where the pesticides were used. There is some evidence I may have had a twin that died and was reabsorbed, so a tiny fetus is curled in a flower beside my mother. Two medicinal plants frame the scene with healing power: passionflower, which calms the nervous system, and Tian Ma, or gastrodia, a Chinese orchid that is part of a classic epilepsy formula in Traditional Chinese Medicine. In this image, I feel them as allies and protectors of my prenatal self, unable to escape exposure, but now, in my 70s, able to heal. About The Ferment Series My multi-genre project, Ferment, explores the impact of “chemicals of control” starting with my own pesticide-induced epilepsy and expanding into a global story of military and agricultural toxicity. My work, in words or in visual art, never documents the terrible without offering some medicine for it. In this case, it’s an immersion into microbiology and the beneficial bacteria that can bioremediate everything from the pesticide dieldrin, to plastic waste, to the residues of war.