From Mark Firth
The feature on Jim Acord, the artist who dreams “of marrying nuclear technology with art”, makes much of his achievement in gaining a licence to handle radioactive materials (“Artistic licence”, 9 December 1995).
I am a London-based sculptor dealing with science as my subject matter. In 1989 I wanted to make a piece about randomness at the quantum level and about the “natural” quality of radioactivity which was, I felt, quite unjustly condemned as a man-made evil. Obtaining a sample of caesium-137 was simplicity itself: I sent my cheque to a firm in the US and two weeks later it arrived in the post, having crossed the Atlantic by ordinary airmail. No licence seemed to be required.
In the finished piece, the caesium source and an acoustic Geiger counter are sealed within an inscribed, machined aluminium box (a nod to Schrödinger) with interactive handles to vary the count rate and an inclined horn (whimsical nod to His Master’s Voice) through which to hear the results. The piece clicks or growls quietly on the wall. I claim this as the first intentionally radioactive sculpture (granite carvings don’t count).
