Alone among a mussel cluster a sea star glows in stillness, vermillion like a smile like sunshine while the sea grass sways. Today I stand in cold tide pools because that is where my bare white feet make sense, alone among the cosmic rhyme of fives.
Category Archives: flora and fauna
Scuppernong Commons
Wowhaus were Artplace Environmenal Artists-in-Residence at the McColl Center for Art and Innovation in Charlotte, North Carolina in late winter of 2015. While in residence we realized an ambitious public project called Scuppernong Commons. The project is sited within Brightwalk, a mixed-income, mixed-use residential development that is a model of sustainable revitalization and economic development […]
Makkeweks, Ifukube, and the Return of the Ray
I’ve flipped the creature and continue to rough out its topsides with my homemade saw Carving is like controlled erosion. A shape emerges in response to the real and imagined forces that dictate how and where material is added and removed. My primary job as I sculpt the Makkeweks sea monster is to manage these […]
Sea Monsters on my mind
The depiction of sea monsters is as old as seafaring. Only the shape, size and imagined intention of the monster changes over time, generally in direct relation to what is being explored and whatever constitutes the boundaries of current knowledge. Sea monsters represent the unknown, simultaneously warding off and goading the curious-minded. Historically, sea monsters […]
Highlights of the Season
Pride of Madeira (Echium candicans) – Echium is in bloom (see above). – Road trip to Santa Barbara. Transmodern highlight: Hanging out in a beach house with the Norwegians, cooking Indian food while listening to hill-billy trip hop. – Meeting film historian Jan Anders Diesen and getting a private lecture and screening of never-before-seen footage […]
Bull Kelp Harvest
Each winter since we’ve lived on the Sonoma Coast and made a daily practice of walking the beaches, I become mildly obsessed with the bull kelp that washes ashore in great heaps after storms. I’ve tried weaving the kelp into seat blanks, drying it as an iodine-rich jerky, and brewing it for a savory stock. […]
Milling the Black Acacia
I took advantage of a break in the storms to mill two black acacia logs with my friend Shawn Gavin. One of the logs had unusually wide sapwood and neither had many branches, so we boule cut them both at 5/4″, leaving live edges. The logs were still pretty green but had been sitting for […]