Underwater Vertigo Caused by Looking Up

Nature has always been my most important inspiration for my art. I grew up taking a landscape painting class over the summers, and, inspired deeply by Georgia O\u27Keeffe\u27s abstract expressionism and Wolf Kahn\u27s vivid color fields, I learned to translate my surroundings into an emotional, intuitive language of color. This translation—seeing nature through the language of human emotion—is a process that I have attempted to use in the rendering of my comps. Always fascinated by the weird, colorful world beneath the ocean, I studied marine ecology in Australia during my sophomore year. Besides being overwhelmed by the rich landscape of the Great Barrier Reef, I learned about the coral bleaching crisis that threatens reefs around the world. Coral bleaching occurs when the delicate symbiosis between the coral animal colony and colorful algae called zooxanthellae is disrupted. The zooxanthellae are very sensitive to changes in their environment, and even a couple degrees of difference can cause the zooxanthellae to abandon a coral colony, which induces the bleaching and slow death of the coral. Perhaps one of the most visually striking effects of global warming, coral bleaching is already devastating reefs. The Great Barrier Reef, the largest reef system in the world, is predicted to undergo irreversible damage by 2030 if immediate action is not taken. My professor in Australia introduced me to Courtney Mattison\u27s project Our Changing Seas, a massive ceramics installation reflecting on the beautiful forms of corals, as well as the porcelain-white of their death. Since then, I have been investigating the potential of my art to address environmental decay in a graceful but poignant way. I believe that art can fill in some gaps left in the scientific/political conversations about climate change, but I have found that there is a fine line between being too subtle and hitting a viewer over the head with the environmentalist message that we have all heard before. I believe that the unique power of art, especially in terms of politics and social change, is that it is able to present ideas that are not logical or easy to put into words. I think that art can evoke and reflect on complicated emotions that, although absent from political or scientific debate, are important in the larger conversations of social movements and policy change. Furthermore, beyond being able to say something different, I think that art can speak to audiences that scientific or political messages may not reach. My comps aims to address the feeling of disturbing helplessness that I feel every time I read another article about the increasingly closer predicted death of the world\u27s coral reefs. There is great sorrow in knowing that the very things that make me human are what threaten the natural world. What I have learned from working with these issues is to remind myself of the similar great human joy in experiencing nature as well. My comps seeks to bridge these two strange and powerful feelings. I learned a lot during my comps process, I have never thought about a project so deeply. I learned many different skills, including firing kilns and making special clay. I spoke to many people, from professors to bio majors, and learned much about myself and my work. I think of my comps as having two major phases, experimentation and production. In the beginning I was learning to work with hand building porcelain, managing my time and stretching my abilities and my imagination. I tried to make every general coral form, and I kept my coral books close by. I worked inspired by true coral forms, but with some degree of play as well. In the second phase, around week 6 or 7, I began to produce as much of the successful forms as I could. I made two batches of porcelain infused with paper pulp to make it stronger and more flexible. I made stamps to speed up my process. The most enjoyable part of my comps was two coral decorating parties that I had, inspired by Soon Kai\u27s participatory comps process, when I invited my friends to my studio to decorate hollow balls with me. Creating together was fun and exciting, we made many corals, and it made me happy to see such a diversity of people in the ceramics studio. On the night of the death of James, Michael and Paxton, Dorae and I were in the studio firing a kiln until 2am, which was a strangely comforting place to be. Two of my friends asked if they could come and make coral, because they didn\u27t know what else to do. After the accident, my comps became part healing process, part escape from the tragedy that had devastated my group of friends. It was comforting for me to make simple things, and I invited my friends to make them with me, but otherwise I didn\u27t know what to do, so I continued working. It was strange to have my comps suddenly feel futile and unimportant, but to turn to it in my grief. I learned how working with clay can be a path to healing. The crux of my comps is in its installation, and so I am both excited and nervous to put it up. I plan to install it for the comps review in the hallway between Printmaking and Ceramics, where I can have some control of the lighting in the evening and natural light during the day. I am still unsure if I want to install the piece in a small room or in the gallery. My initial idea of enveloping one person is possible, I think, with the amount of pieces I have made. I also made several fish, which I plan to paint black and hang among the coral, to hint at the biodiversity lost in a dead reef. I aim to create a space in which a person can walk into the reef and be surrounded by it, from above and from all sides. I will bunch similar corals together and try to create an organic-growth feeling in the way they are spaced. I want to have my projection on the corals in such a way that it is impossible to interact with the piece without blocking the image. Although I want to allow the viewers to make their own connection with the images and the forms, I intend to mention coral bleaching in my description of the piece. My video is still in process, right now I am collecting clips from Vimeo that are either under the Creative Commons license or brief enough to be usable under copyright law. I plan to experiment with saturating the color of the images to achieve as colorful an effect as possible. After hanging some pieces with fishing-line, I am attracted to the idea of a dense curtain of shiny line, especially if I can get the projected image to interact with it. I hope that the glimmer of the fishing-line will create a small visual reference to the way the underside of the surface of the ocean glows. The visceral feeling of underwater vertigo—the feeling of looking up while deep below the ocean—is a feeling I would like to achieve. In creating my comps, I drew from the interactive and beautifully sad work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the huge, socially-minded projects of Francis Alÿs, the elegant renderings of environmental and cultural loss by John Pule, and the dogged glacier photojournalism of James Balog. I have also been thinking about the organic/mathematical forms of Ernst Haeckel, Tara Donovan, Roxy Paine and Laura Stack, and of course the brave ancestors of my project, Cortney Mattison\u27s Our Changing Seas and The Hyperbolic Crochet Reef by The Institute for Figuring. In the larger context of art, I see my comps as a product of my liberal-arts education in its combination of science, social conscience, and art. I also see it as a contribution to the movement of participatory social art, taking art out of the white cube and into the muddier circles of environmentalism, science, and group experiences. I had the idea for this project in Ross\u27 last lecture for his Art Since 1945 class, which was on the contemporary relationship between art and social change. After despairing many times in his class, thinking that my approach to art was archaic and irrelevant, this lecture inspired me to take my environmentalist-art a step further. In particular, Ross talked about how the work of artists such as Gonzales-Torres and Alÿs became larger, interactive events or experiences that engaged the viewer to a point where he or she became a participant in the work. Gonzales-Torres\u27 Lover Boys I think is incredibly nuanced but powerful, if a viewer takes a piece of candy offered by the installation, he or she becomes implicit in the destruction of the two bodies represented. If he or she declines to take a piece of candy, he or she is ignoring the issue, which is maybe a little bit worse. It is this inescapable implication of the viewer that I tried to emulate with my projection/shadow idea in my piece. Alÿs\u27 work When Faith Moves Mountains is incredible in its combination of melancholy and hope. In the piece, Alÿs recruited 500 volunteers to move across a sand dune in a line, shoveling sand behind them the entire way. In effect the whole sand dune was moved a couple of centimeters, which of course means nothing in the larger scheme of things, but as a feat in itself is equal parts quixotic and poignantly poetic. The emotion that learning about this piece gave me was something else I strove for in my comps, the dual largeness and smallness of every human and his/her impact on the world. Working on my comps has made me feel hopeful that art can not only be part of the environmental discussion, but can be a vital place for addressing the human and emotional side of the debate. In the future I am excited to continue to explore the intersection of art, science, and humans through artistic experimentation, collaborative creation, adventure, and learning from others around me. This comps process has been strange but positive, and I am glad that I have been able to have this experience with the Boliou community