In his work Roller Skating Girl, artist Peter Shellenberger uses radioactive pottery as a mechanism for exposing light-sensitive material and revealing secrets of the natural world. Informed by years spent frequenting flea markets and drawing from the history of science and art, Shellenberger discovered that the red-orange glaze found in 1930’s Fiestaware was created using uranium oxide, the same kind of uranium later used to make the atomic bomb. By experimenting with long exposure times, controlled lighting, unexposed film, a Fiestaware bowl and a Cracker Jack toy from the same era, the results display a delicate silhouette set against a luminescent background evocative of the sun. At once “all-knowing” and oblivious, familiar and unknown, the vintage figurine is transformed into an abstract vision, a subject lit by a nuclear glow  and encountered only as a trace, a memory, or a dream.