Name: 【TEDx】TEDxEast - Lauren Redniss - Mistakes Have Been Made
Uploaded: 2014-05-02T04:42:04.000Z
Duration: 12 min 24 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

I recently published a book called 'Radioactive.'

It's a visual book about invisible things.

It tells the story of two scientists, Marie and Pierre Curie.

It's a love story and a story full of drama.

At the turn of the 19th century a young woman moves

from Russian-occupied Poland to come study in Paris.

She finds room to do her research in the laboratory

of a reserved and handsome scientist studying heat and magnetism.

They marry and have two children and begin working together.

expanding the Periodic Table, with radium and polonium,

and they begin investigating the startling properties of these two elements.

They recognise this radioactivity to be an atomic property.

It's one of the critical moments in the history of modern science.

great marriage, accomplished couple, two beautiful daughters.

And then in 1906, Pierre Curie is killed in a tragic street accident.

Marie is forced to continue their work alone,

which she does, earning a second Nobel Prize.

Which, by the way, is completely unprecedented.

Now not only is she the first woman to have won the Nobel Prize

but she is the first Double Nobel Laureate

in two different sciences, Chemistry and Physics.

And a few years later she falls in love again --

this time with the physicist Paul Langevin.

Another fabulous romance -- a coupling of two scientific giants --

Needless to say -- famous people in a love triangle --

In addition to the narrative about the Curies' biography,

it also leaps forward in time to look at the contemporary

From nuclear weapons to nuclear power to nuclear medicine.

But, long story short, there are these two central themes:

Those are the invisible things I was referring to earlier.

And, because this is a book in which I'm doing the writing and the research

and the artwork and also the design of the book itself,

it's very important to me that each of these components is meaningful

and that they each embody the ideas in the narrative.

So, when it became time for me to choose the medium

with which I was going to create the artwork --

I decided that I would make the images with something

called cyanotype printing. Cyanotype printing is

To make a cyanotype print, you take paper, you coat it with certain chemicals.

You take that chemically coated paper, you expose them

to the ultraviolet rays of the sun and that turns the paper a deep blue.

Now, a process using exposure to penetrating rays --

I thought made sense in a book about the history of radioactivity.

A cyanotype print has this kind of moody, twilight quality.

The white lines against the blue background --

I thought captured what Marie Curie described

as the element radium's spontaneous luminosity.

So, I just want to step you through here the making of one page in the book.

This is a spread, it depicts the royal banquet when Marie

has arrived in Stockholm to accept her second Nobel Prize.

So just to take one step back from that --

When I begin, basically, I'm always collecting drawings.

I'm just, everyday drawing and I never know when I do a drawing

if it's going to end up in my published work,

but I just keep gathering this little archive for myself.

This is a still life I did on my kitchen table.

These are some jazz musicians that I drew at a club downtown.

My sketchbook from a Parsons' faculty meeting.

I was doing archival research looking at different source material.

And then, I take these disparate elements and I recombine

them into one composition that gives them a new context.

And sometimes I'm surprised by the new meaning

Because I wanna make a cyanotype printing, I then take this drawing,

I turn it into a negative on transparency, on an acetate sheet.

I then take that acetate sheet, I place it on the chemically coated paper.

As I mentioned, I expose that to the UV-rays of the sun.

And -- this is the blue image that would result.

I'll then oftentimes hand-color the image -- in this case with color-pencil.

And then, the final step is adding the typeface.

So, this all makes the process seem very smooth.

So, now I tell you the truth, which is in one example:

as I mentioned earlier, Pierre Curie was killed in 1906 in a street accident.

And when I got to working on this part of the narrative, I really struggled.

Because I couldn't imagine how I was going to portray this harrowing moment.

How could I capture in an image the wrenching emotion of a man killed,

a woman who loses her husband, her scientific partner, the father of her children.

I looked to Japanese prints and their portrayal of grief.

I read Marie Curie's own diaries, which are just devastating.

She's described seeing her husband's body, it's decomposing corpse.