Vasili Pochitsky's black stork, wings outstretched in flight, swoops over a desolate landscape of leafless trees and small helpless childlike figures. Death and birth are one in a strange dreamlike world.
Violent contradiction is also at the heart of Susan Enticknap's child's high chair fashioned from thick, jagged thorns which suggests Christlike punishment of innocence.
They are among the most vivid images of an extraordinarily powerful exhibition that now occupies the foyer of the UN headquarters building on the edge of the East River in New York - "Blackwind Whiteland: living with Chernobyl". Belarus, which, with the Ukraine and western Russia, bore the brunt, is "White Russia". The black wind is Chernobyl's still blowing, still killing radiation.
Invited to the UN by the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, funded by an enlightened grant of £43,000 by the Irish Government to mark the 15th anniversary of the reactor explosion, the exhibition is an appeal to the conscience of the world conceived by Adi Roche, the American photographer, Paul Fusco, and volunteers from Ireland's Chernobyl Children's Project.
Fusco's black-and-white pictures from his many trips to the Ukraine and Belarus, now published as a book, are the mesmerising heart of the exhibition. In images of children with twisted, tortured limbs and cancerous growths the size of footballs, he has managed to convey pain yet hope and dignity. In the eyes of orphans, are dark, deep, beautiful wells of sadness.
In one series he captures the slow death of a girl of 17 who came to Ireland for treatment and then went home to die in what they know as Death Valley. In another from an orphanage in Minsk, the awkward play of children with cerebral palsy.
Christine Simpson, the Waterford Liverpudlian art teacher, who, over two years, pulled together the exhibition, the work of 17 artists, film-makers and photographers, says she struggled hard to avoid evoking pity and has succeeded. If this collection succeeds in reducing to tears - and only the most hard-hearted can fail to be moved - they are of anger that man could do this to his own.
Fifteen years on and the disaster of Chernobyl is still happening, the indefatigable Ms Roche reminds me, as we snatch moments out of her frantic schedule in the UN canteen. The reactor is still belching radiation into the air from a sarcophagus whose gaping holes are the size of tractors and whose collapse could happen any day. "The next Chernobyl", she warns, "could be Chernobyl itself." And in summer the dry, contaminated earth drifts as dust on the breeze, spreading more death.
The statistics pour out of her: 90 per cent of the children of Belarus are affected, nine million people in the three countries, 2,000 towns and villages deserted, 400,000 evacuees, and the birth rate is down 50 per cent as women fear what birth may bring. Children born with thyroid cancer - one in four have a thyroid abnormality. Horrendous genetic defects as the children of Chernobyl now become the parents of Chernobyl. Suicides up 2,000 per cent. Thirteen thousand deaths among those sent in to clean up the land. And one professor estimates the eventual global death toll at close on one million.
Ms Roche wants a Marshall Plan for the region, demands that others follow Ireland's example to offer free medical care to the children . . .
The exhibition is also testimony to Ms Roche's work and that of the Chernobyl Children's Project the scale of whose involvement is unique in the region. To date it has supplied $25 million in medicines and supplies and over 100 ambulances. Last week another 23 ambulances went out and 10 articulated lorries with £2 million more supplies; 8,500 children have been brought to Ireland for holidays while the health service has performed life-saving operations or given long-term care to 60 children.
And as soon as the exhibition is launched and she has used it to twist more arms for cash she'll be back home preparing for what she calls "the invasion", 1,200 more children heading for Irish holidays this summer.
psmyth@irish-times.ie
