There was no design statement that I could view, but I would guess that the image is ethnographic in "studying up" re corporate discourses of disaster/toxicant remediation. The assumption is that only liquid mercury is hazardous and that changing the form will remediate/buffer the toxicity; but the remediation is mostly discursive (i.e., b/c there's less awareness of cinnabar's toxicity in the present moment).
The image communicates the authority and persuasive rhetoric of corporate sponsored remediation science: "cinnabar" circulates in the contemporary U.S. (or for my age group, at least) as the name of an Estee Lauder perfume (associated in orientalist fashion with lacquerware), not as a toxic ore from which mercury was extracted. The critical commentary communicates well the larger pix--aka the global awareness of mercury toxicity through Minimata and the dancing cats--as well as Mad Hatter and high levels of mercury in artic fish. The meme of the dancing cat famous from Minimata proves a useful comparison to the image of the Matador bottle.