Frances Gallardo, works from Aerosoles (Aerosols), 2021–22

Narrator: Frances Gallardo’s “Aerosol Series” came out of her fascination with the meteorology of Puerto Rico.

Frances Gallardo: I explored the phenomenon of the hurricane for many, many years in many ways. I inevitably came to know and to get interested in the Sahara dust because the dust is kind of in a dance with hurricanes, right? All of these aerosols, all of the salt, everything that is in the atmosphere is in a constant dance, is in constant relationship, right? Hurricanes drag the sand storms that travel in the Atlantic ocean toward the Caribbean.

All of the minerals that the Sahara dust storms carry actually multiply the light. So the sun looks twenty times the size. It changes the landscape. It's like a very saturated color: flowers, greens. So I was really interested in this juxtaposition of landscapes. And also the democratic feel of it, the same way hurricanes take heats and water and anything from different political boundaries—the same way the Sahara dust also does not care about political boundaries.

Narrator: Gallardo collected a sample of the Sahara dust in Santurce, a neighborhood in San Juan. She brought it to the Textiles Nanotechnology Lab at Cornell University in Ithaca. They processed the sample with a field emissions scanning electron microscope, and Gallardo created a heat etching of the resulting image.

Frances Gallardo: They processed the small sample with the field emissions scanning electron microscope.

The etching creates reliefs in the paper: the darker the shadow, the deeper the valley. I then manipulated the digital images with software by erasing the background and replacing it with grids of many styles and sizes, which I hand colored with gradations to convey depth movement and suspension. For me, not only do these images speak about the invisible in the landscape, but the invisible emotions of life in the changing climate.