Megan Gafford - "Pushing Daises (Progression of Mutation)" and "Pushing Daisies (Rocky Flats)"

A physicist helped artist Megan Gafford dose daisy seeds with radiation to mutate them like flowers found near the 2011 Fukushima meltdown. Those blossoms were elongated like caterpillars. The misshapen daisies reminded Gafford of Lyndon Johnson’s infamous 1964 campaign ad depicting a little girl counting daisy petals until a nuclear explosion engulfed the television screen. The cartoonish and childlike daisy is a potent symbol of innocence or–in the case of mutant daisies–innocence corrupted. Gafford uses these associations to make art that would evoke the tension between pursuing knowledge and curiosity killing the cat.

For Pushing Daisies (Progression of Mutation), Gafford drew five of the daisies that she grew from the irradiated seeds. Although these seeds were dosed with massive amounts of x-ray radiation, most of the blossoms appeared normal. Some were slightly misshapen, and others were extraordinary.

For Pushing Daisies (Rocky Flats), Gafford drew twenty misshapen daisies that she found at Rocky Flats, Colorado, which is the site of a former nuclear weapons facility that was heavily contaminated by plutonium waste in the 1950s and ‘60s. These drawings are based on Gafford’s photographs taken in June 2019.