Archival Art Print of "Twilight" by Aurora Levins Morales

About The Work Twilight (Children of War #2) is one of a series of five metaphorical portraits of Vietnamese children impacted by Agent Orange, which was sprayed onto the forests of Viet Nam between 1962 and 1970 to deprive the Vietnamese resistance of both shelter and food. Looking and documentary photography of these children, I knew I could not use them. They had no hint of consent, and were taken to shock and horrify. While exposing the war crimes of the US is a worthy goal, the children themselves appeared as objects. I wanted to show not only the harm done to them but also their beauty and dignity. I used plants, rocks and carved stone faces to create portraits, not of the children themselves—their stories are not mine to tell—but of how knowing about them impacted me, a different kind chemically wounded child. I constructed the image in Twilight with tree trunks, leeks, woody stems and a Meso-American clay sculpture that resembles some of the ways that Agent Orange rearranges the faces of the young. 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.