Robin Chapman
to
Steenbock Gallery of the Wisconsin Academy 1922 University Ave., Madison, Wisconsin 53726
press release:
Artist’s statement: I grew up in the Manhattan Project town of Oak Ridge, TN, home of the gaseous diffusion plant that separated uranium-235 from U-238 for the atomic bomb. Other stories have recently been told about the Project towns; perhaps this exhibit reflects what happened to the children.
Oak Ridge was my hometown from the age of 4 until I went away to college. It was a gated community of young scientists, a Federal reservation built in the years of WWII. As children who had yet to learn our history, we were free to run outside and listen to stories or play with the other kids in the neighborhood from dawn to dusk in the greenbelt oak woods of the east Tennessee hills left as camouflage for the town by the Army Corps of Engineers.
Here you see that childhood recalled, in my new poetry book, Six True Things (Tebot Bach, 2016), and in the acrylic paintings that return to the images of trees, flowers, fields, and woods that I learned to love in childhood and still do. I have keyed some of the paintings to pages in the poetry book, though these are connections seen only in hindsight.