my pacific coast muse

Category: aquatic life (Page 1 of 2)

to bob

I grew up on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound. I thought of the water as an ocean, and swam in it at every opportunity. I traveled up and down the eastern seaboard up through my twenties, and experienced the Atlantic Ocean unbuffered by Long Island. However, nothing prepared me for the fierce and incessant energy of the Pacific Ocean.

I naively moved west thinking that I would regularly swimming along northern California’s coast. Happily, I received plenty of warning before diving in: the undercurrents, the rip tides, the sneaker waves, and the occasional sharks. And of course the icy temperatures, which mean a stiff and heavy and expensive rubber swimsuit from head to toe. This latter part really put me off. Part of the allure of swimming in the ocean is being naked or at least near naked and getting completely wet! Also, swimming is not really a thing here. There are no small islands or reefs to swim to, no boats moored offshore, no rafts or spots to pull out.

For the past six years or so, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time down at the shore, mostly peering into tide pools. I’ve photographed the coast during winter storms, and spent hours watching harbor seals weave through the kelp. But this past summer, after more than twenty years since moving to this coast, I finally went in. Once a week, at 9:30 am, a small group meets at a cove in a state park, and goes out “bobbing.” Just hanging out in the Pacific, wearing wetsuits and snorkel gear. Twelve months of the year. The chief instigator of this group is a naturalist, an interpreter for the state park system, and has a good idea of what’s happening around us, no matter the season. It’s mesmerizing, in the best sense of that word. Harbor seals come to say hi, and herons look even more spectacular from out in the water. It feels so great to be IN the ocean, even in a giant thick layer of neoprene.

worm

Sabellidae?

I’m reading up on worms, and while I haven’t checked with anyone yet, I think this is a type of tube worm in the family Sabellidae, commonly called a feather duster worm. Which if you think about it, is an odd way to refer to its gorgeous feather-like anatomy.

Why not call it a feather worm? Or a bird worm? Or wing worm? (okay, that last one sounds like ring worm with a lisp) Feather duster? As in, we pluck birds and use their beautiful plumage to wipe the cocktail of dust mites and car exhaust off of our tawdry trinkets?

Or is it a sly reference to “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” knowing that worms might eat our bones? This feather duster will make short work of our dusty remains. But that just can’t be. This isn’t the worm of our morbid funerary fantasies. This little beauty lives underwater. I doubt that the likes of Ahab are at the top of its preferred dining list.

There is one aspect of this common name that I appreciate, and that is its common-ness. It’s a workaday name for something extravagantly beautiful, an ode to all of those in the cleaning industry, to everyone who has ever done the hard work of trying to keep a shine on life, an ode to every woman and man who has ever been relegated to cleaning up the mess of others.

alien planet

The tides have been perfect during this first week of the year: perigee lows during the afternoon’s oblique sun, warmish down by the water, not too windy. The water is COLD though, and I’ve managed to get thoroughly soaked every day. Worth it. So amazing.

Here is a stunning creature from January 1, 2019. I think it’s a wormsnail called Serpulorbis squamigerus, from searching SeaNet.

Serpulorbis squamigerus?

The next day I returned to look at it again, and an anemone had crept into the frame:

wormsnail with lurking anemone

The California Academy of Science just sent out a newsletter saying that its researchers had discovered 229 new plant and animal species this past year, and among those are 34 new sea slugs. These are just from Cal Academy researchers! They also wrote that biodiversity scientists estimate that less than 10% of the earth’s species have been discovered. I wonder, of that 10%, how many are commonly known, and of those, how many are commonly appreciated? I know that my own understanding of the life forms around me is severely limited. “Severly limited” is a euphemism for impoverished and ignorant.

These two images are just to the left and right of the wormsnail above, all within about twenty-five square centimeters. So much life!

Of the many amazing things about life in the tide pools are the common strategies that are so (visibly) foreign to life on land. GOO. Goo is big. Sticky goo. Gooey tentacles, a single viscous “foot,” gluey suction, watery sacks. And stacking. Species stuck on species glued to species getting a free ride on yet another species. 

Today is the last perfect day of shooting for a while, before the rain begins again, before the lows inch their way back to higher levels and happen after sunset.

Scenic Overlook

copepodilia-fix
The Fix and Copepodilia in Scenic Overlook at Patricia Sweetow Gallery

Back in May, I had an exhibit at Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco. A few of the projects already discussed here were part of the exhibit:  The Fix, Copepodilia, Pacific Falls, and Collision. I also showed three new selections from a series of videos called “In the Time of…” which were inspired by Pool The works were all about the small yet essential creatures easily overlooked in a vast landscape.

These little videos are about the experience of gazing into a tide pool, and the timelessness of that experience. Maybe timelessness isn’t the right word…  Anyhow, In the Time of… led to another video work called Eclipse and that has led to a new idea for a larger video installation. More on all of this later, but in the meantime:

In the time of Anemones

I wonder, sometimes, if this obsession with tide pools is foolish. Has everyone done this as a kid, laid on their bellies and stared into a rocky little pool filled with strange life forms? This past weekend I was talking with two adults in their 70s. One was an architect and designer, the other a french scholar, both professors for many years in Montreal. My granddaughter came over to talk with us, and I mentioned that I was taking her to the tide pools later that day. They asked, “What’s a tide pool?”  I stuttered. How to describe these universal worlds…? My granddaughter offered that there are lots of starfish in tide pools and they said that they’d never seen a living star fish, only photos – not even video!

In the time of Stars (hermits scuttle over baby starfish)

Our oceans are vast and take up most of the planet, but we’re small in comparison, and need to make our way to the edges to experience the saltwater shoreline. With privatization, industry, ports, pollution, highways, etc. it’s not easy to experience the shore even when one lives close to an ocean. And many shorelines have marshes and other intertidal ecosystems, but no tide pools to speak of. So I guess there’s relevance in attempting to share this experience. It’s a big part of what art does, right? It takes us to places (both physical and not) and give us experiences that we will otherwise never have? And then, hopefully, tap into our capacity for empathy? Cause us to stop, slow down, muse, maybe have a revelation?

In the time of Hermits

diatoms

I recently finished reading The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in the past few years, along with Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction. Both of these books are about the big picture, about deep time and the interrelatedness of all things, living and non-living. The Invention of Nature is primarily about the life of Alexander von Humboldt and his impact on contemporary science and environmentalism, about his understanding of our impact on climate, and many other things, including his influence on people: Haeckel, Thoreau, Muir, and others. I hadn’t expected to find Haeckel in this book – or Thoreau or Muir for that matter – but it was a delightfully serendipitous encounter, as I’d been drawing diatoms based on Haeckel’s drawings. Haeckel’s depictions of these tiny creatures are so beautiful, so filled with flourish and fantastically obsessive intricacy. My own drawings are so slow to construct, built up from hundreds of tiny elements. Here is a photo of the first one in progress, far from finished:

diatoms

diatom drawing in progress, 24″ x 24″

free ride

Here are two more nudibranchs from Salt Point. The video shows (I think) a Cockerell’s Dorid. It’s right at the water line, and is hitching a free ride on a limpet. Or maybe trying to eat it? By the end of the video, you can see its foot and the rhinophores, yellow-tipped and feathery, in the lower left. The photo is of a tiny white-spotted Dorid (I think), about 2cm long, inside a mussel shell.

tinyDorid

 

nudibranchs

I’ve started a new work that has me, happily, back to shooting video in the tide pools at Salt Point. It means catching the tides and the weather at the right hour, on days when I’m in the area – a rare mix. Friday was a perfect day, and I was trying out a new borrowed camera, an Olympus TG-5. Day One: two nudibranch sitings! A good omen.

Cerulean Blues

June and July and nearly August…

As I listed these months, counting the time since my last post, a cover of “Fly Like an Eagle” by Tony Crown started playing in the background. It was a slow ghostly version of the old Steve Miller Band song, never heard this version before. Perfect synchronicity. Time keeps on slipping…

But I haven’t been sleeping by the sea. Gabriel Harrison chose a number of works during a studio visit in early spring, most of them recent, for a solo exhibit at Stanford called Cerulean Blues. He put together a beautiful installation, especially for Copepodilia: 64 images varying in size from 10″ x 8″ to 50″ x 40″. It was up for much of July and just closed yesterday.

One work was unresolvable – the photographs of collisions along the coast. I’ll figure it out eventually, but for now, I pared it down to just one image, same title as the show: Cerulean Blues.

cerulean.jpg
Cerulean Blues   pigment print on Arches Aquarelle   40″ x 60″   2017
Cerulean Installation 1
most of Copepodilia 2017, with Pool 2017 in the foreground
sandbox
Sandbox   sorted sand on birch boxes   33″ x 103″   2017
Blues Sand Pool
Cerulean Blues 2017, Sandbox 2017, and Pool 2017 in the foreground
Wind Pool Cope
Homage to the Wind 2012, Pool 2017, and a bit of Copepodilia 2017

swimmy Pool video

Thanks to David Stroud for shooting this video of Pool at Hosfelt Gallery. It’s the most beautifully sunny gallery in all of San Francisco, so the video is a little pale. There’s a Nam June Paik piece across the room that’s an aquarium in an old wooden CRT television case, critters built out of vacuum tubes, with watery sounds and whale calls. You can see it in the background of the photos in the previous post. Perfect company!

Pool installation at Hosfelt Gallery from Gail Wight on Vimeo taped by David Stroud.

Pool

Pool is finally up at Hosfelt Gallery. Well… it’s been up for two weeks, but I’m just getting Pool-Hosfelt-2-wparound to posting some photos. So here’s how it works: Pool was shot in the tide pools of Salt Point from late January through April of this year. The video is projected onto the floor, passing through a large dish just below the projector holding about six liters of water.  The central video shows a round pool of waves washing seaweed onto the shore, and you can hear the waves lapping over and over. Six round videos surround this central image, each representing a tide pool. Some of the pools show a wide shot of activity, a few are macro close-ups, one is primarily red creatures. There are two other sounds: seagulls and fog horns. The gulls and the foghorns are triggered by electronics, which in turn trigger motors fitted with paddles, which in turn churn the water, which in turn distorts the video with wave patterns. The gulls and fog horns sound infrequently, and give the sensation of peering through the waves.

Pool is related to other recent works all made in the same area, in which I’m trying to learn to see – to see and to understand. I’ve spent a few decades in the area of Salt Point, but I feel like I’m only just beginning to understand the density and complexity of life there.  Secondarily, the work is about the fragility and resiliency of that life. The Pool-Hosfelt-3wpintertidal zone is a fascinating space between the high and low tides of oceans around the world. It’s a harsh space, subject to constant extremes, and exists in constant oscillation between dry exposure and salty inundation. It seems like a space filled with evolutionary experimentation, but it’s also a highly structured space. Each species fills a specific niche between high and low, wet and dry, exposed and hidden, hot and cold, still and rushing. Each of those narrow zones is susceptible to incessant tidal and seasonal changes. With rising and warming oceans, that’s a recipe for disaster. Many of these species can’t move easily or quickly, some can’t move at all once they become adults (mussels, barnacles, seaweed, etc).
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