SHOP
In this project, I aim to create counter narratives to the stories of fathers of western science, the ones who claim to have discovered everything under the sun. From mycology to astronomy, men have taken the credit for experiments undertaken by women for centuries. Through these images, I want to commemorate all the unpaid labor women had to perform to be close to science, to nature. Mary Banning, the author of unpublished The Fungi of Maryland, a leading mycologist of her time, did not receive any funding for research. She died penniless. She was often called a mad woman for her curiosity of a fungal kingdom. Muriel Mussells Seyfert, one of the human computers at the Harvard College Observatory. She discovered three new ring nebulae in the Milky Way galaxy in the mid-1930s. To enter the male dominated field, the human computers would sometimes offer their services for free. After stroking the body of the telescope, clamming their eyeball against the surface that is closest to the skin of the star, men would photograph the universe to categorise it. Women computers, like her, would then stare at the dots, speckles, rubbing, strings, lines, anything that was captured by the photographic plane, annotating them precisely, aching to hold the telescope. These images are an ode to mad women of science and the army of crazy modern witches who lay in the mud till the earth fruits and stay to hear the sounds of its birth.