American artist Sandy Walker is engaging with the tragedy and legacy of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima through her art. Speaking to UN News at the United Nations Headquarters, Walker discussed the launch of Tamiki Hara’s posthumously published final work, My Deepest Desire. The book features Hara’s writings alongside Walker’s ink drawings and a new translation by Liza Dalby.
Published in 1951, after Hara’s suicide, My Deepest Desire is a poetic short story exploring the longing for a “more different, more full life.” Hara interweaves his wife’s death prior to the Hiroshima bombing with the devastation and aftermath of the attack, creating a work that oscillates between dream, despair, memory, and survival.
Walker emphasized the power of art to transform historical trauma into something urgently human. Describing her passionate approach to the bombing as a “matter of justice,” Walker stated that encountering Hara’s writings evoked an immediate emotional response.
She noted that Hara conveyed his personal experience and his attempt to make sense of it, finding the writing difficult to categorize in traditional literary terms but profoundly impactful in its directness.
From Words to Images: Visualizing Trauma
When asked about translating such material into visuals, Walker responded, “Just as Hara found the words for it, for me, visual art is the same tool of translation.” The artist explained that the project developed slowly over decades. She first encountered Hara’s work while collaborating with her late wife, Ellen Webb, a dancer and choreographer, on a performance about Hiroshima. After carrying the text with her for years, the visuals eventually emerged.
In the book’s artist’s preface, Walker wrote, “I found the images on a dark night, or perhaps they found me,” detailing how the project ultimately took shape through a series of ink drawings. Rather than treating text and image as separate domains, she described them as complementary ways of addressing the same lived reality. She suggested that painting and writing have different limits of perception, and meaning often arises in the space between them.
Bringing Absence to Life: The Human Scale of Art
Walker’s approach was influenced by earlier collaborative work, such as the “Shadow Project” she developed with artist Alan Gussow in 1982. This project involved drawing human silhouettes in public spaces with white paint where intense heat and blast effects in Hiroshima had erased bodies, leaving only their outlines. The gesture was intentionally simple but conceptually direct, aimed at making absence visible.
“It wasn’t an abstraction. It was real, and people could experience it as such,” Walker said. Over time, the project expanded internationally, with participants recreating the silhouettes in over a thousand locations around the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. Walker and Webb also participated in the project in their small community in the North Cascades of Washington State.
“It was like bringing it home to people – it was real, and they could experience it as such,” she added. Later, after hearing the words of Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets during a visit to Wyoming in the late 1980s, the couple created a performance piece examining the bombing and its legacy. Walker reportedly first encountered Hara’s writings while researching for this performance.
Art as an Individual Encounter
Walker stressed that art operates through individual experience, not collective messaging. “Art is experienced individually. It then becomes a cumulative experience, but it starts with one person,” she stated. In this view, a work’s political or historical meaning is not conveyed as a declaration but is built through repeated acts of attention, where each viewer experiences the piece on their own terms.
Enduring Belief in Transformation
When asked about the relevance of such work amid a resurgence of global nuclear tensions, Walker responded with a single word: “Stop.” She also reiterated her belief in the power of creating change over time through accumulated individual experiences. “I have a very strong faith in the arts. I still believe in it,” she said. For Sandy Walker, the work connected to Hiroshima signifies not just commemoration but the maintenance of a form of attention that rejects abstraction, demanding the human scale of historical violence and the possibility that perception itself can be altered.
