Category: aquatic life (Page 2 of 2)

thrashed about

March 25, 2017 / gailwight / 2 Comments

I just ordered this book from a store in Oregon: said-no-book

I ordered it, ostensibly, for the graduate seminar I’ll be teaching this spring on “professional practices” for artists. It’s good to have alternatives. While I wait, I’m indulging in a fantasy about this book: that it will give me great peace of mind, reassurance, and affirmation. It will be humorous, and it will make me believe that capitalism is a weak force in the universe.

hermitL

Also while I wait, I continue to shoot video of tide pools for a new work in progress. I shot this footage above yesterday. In case it’s difficult to see what it is, it’s a hermit crab thrashing another hermit crab against a rock, over and over again. Yes, it’s a gif that I made out of about two seconds of footage, but I watched this happen for a good five minutes – all of it recorded – before the thrasher hauled the thrashee away in a huff. I imagine it was a huff. To any hermit crab experts out there, what was this all about? The thrashee is clearly smaller, much too small to donate it’s tiny shell to its abuser. I get stressed out, watching it… which makes me wonder why I made it.

Copepodilia’s virtual debut

March 24, 2017 / gailwight / 2 Comments

I’ve just heard from Julia Krolik that our conversation about Copepodilia is now online:
Julia is one of the curators of the blog Art the Science, from a fascinating Canadian organization of the same name. Lots of great art to be found there; I’m honored to be included.

Copepodilia at Stanford Art Gallery I mentioned these prints in an earlier post, but they’ve now grown even bigger, 30″ x 20″ on Arches rag. They still look crazily 3-d, with so much textural detail. I’m surprised they don’t smell like the sea.

Copepodilia 62

The Fix

February 24, 2017 / gailwight / 2 Comments

So the abalone kintsugi project is at the San Jose Museum of Art for the next six months, part of a show called “Your Mind, This Moment” curated by Susan Krane.

: The Fix

The piece is out on a porch, off of the second floor gallery. It will be out in the rain and the sun and the fog. I love the idea of it being back in the elements, such as they are. Rich Karson built the ideal redwood table for it, and carved some redwood supports that curve perfectly along the inside of the shell.

I’m taking a break for now, while I focus on a new work for an upcoming show at Hosfelt Gallery, but eventually I’ll get back to fixing broken abalone. It will be interesting to see how the pieces I make in my studio will meld onto this initial shellopolis once it comes home from the museum. In the meantime, I love this spot as its first adventure out into the world. I realized it’s also the perfect test to see if I can keep it outside, in case it eventually bursts the seams of my studio.

hermit

February 1, 2017 / gailwight / 0 Comments

[wpvideo O9fEeF5T]

the news makes me want to curl up in a shell.

top dollar or bargain basement?

and this little ad seems so wrong. cheaper than a candy bar. cheaper than a cup of coffee. cheaper than a pair of sox, three first class stamps, or a pack of gum.

tidepools

January 15, 2017 / gailwight / 0 Comments

I’m working on a new piece about tide pools, or about whatever it is that tide pools are about. In any case, I need lots of footage of tide pools and of tides, coming and going. Yesterday, the shoot was mainly just dealing with technical issues. I walked along a good stretch of shore at Salt Point, looking for suitable locations and after two hours of being knee deep in the icy Pacific, I was ready to leave. I packed up my gear and stood up to leave… and looked over my shoulder at the next rocky pool behind me. There was an anemone, larger than my head, easily the biggest anemone I’d ever seen. Thinking back to the post about the captive anemone, this must have been an ancient individual. I returned today to spend some time with it. Beautiful.

[wpvideo XEOpvV3c]

kintsugi

December 27, 2016 / gailw / 0 Comments

urushi

I’ve been working on this piece since late summer, in short bursts in between other things. The pieces were small, at first. They kept curling in on themselves, the curve of the shell quickly resolving into abalone-sized abalone. And the Japanese enamels traditionally used in kintsugi kept giving me crazy rashes identical to poison oak. I kept pushing against the natural inclination of the shell to curl into a finished form. I wasn’t sure how big I wanted the final piece to me, but I knew I wanted it to grow monstrous. Continue reading

aquariums

December 27, 2016 / gailw / 0 Comments

At the end of “The Ocean at Home: An Illustrated History of the Aquarium” the author Bernd Brunner admits to trouble in paradise, and offers this quote from the son of Phillip Henry Gosse, writing about his father in 1907. Gosse was a popularizer of the aquarium in the mid to late 19th century, and his books and lectures contributed to a craze in home aquariums. This led, of course, to a massive plundering of sea life from seashores around the world. Continue reading

captive anemone

December 11, 2016 / gailw / 0 Comments

I’ve been reading The Ocean at Home: an Illustrated History of the Aquarium by Brend Brunner. It was a gift from Marcia Tanner back in 2006, and I’m just getting around to reading it, but it’s perfect timing.

Anthopleura xanthogrammica

Like nearly all texts about science history, there’s an undercurrent of the macabre. On page 26 there’s a story about Scottish scientist Sir John Dalyell who, in 1827, brought a captive anemone (Actinia equina) home from North Berwick and essentially kept it as an experimental pet in his home aquarium. He fed it “pieces of mussels and oysters,” so these must have been dead already, and he changed the water in the aquarium daily, supposedly.

D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (On Growth and Form) wrote about this anemone in his book Science and the Classics. Apparently, this anemone outlived Dalyell by a couple of decades, passing away in 1887 at the age of sixty. Continue reading

Copepodilia

December 6, 2016 / gailw / 0 Comments

part of Copepodilia in my studio

The amount of seaweed that washes up in Stillwater Cove is amazing. It seems to be vastly more than any other beaches in the area – forty or so types as opposed to four or five. It’s amazing. And smelly. And I’m learning that the amount also depends on the time of year, with late summer bringing in huge swaths, making deep and wide tidelines.

Just as I was starting to learn the names of all of these different algae, I read in Melanie L. J. Stiassny’s “Opulent Oceans: Extraordinary Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History” that copepods were the most numerous animal on the planet, and that they inhabited nearly every body of water on earth. I’d heard the name copepod but didn’t really know what it was. I looked it up, but then stopped… and before I could fix a factual understanding of copepods in my mind, I started making these imaginary ones, using the Victorian art of seaweed pressing. They share the basic anatomical structure of copepods, but then veer off into quixotic possibilities, largely dictated by the seaweed itself. The final series has sixty-four prints, 22″ x 17″ on Arches cold press. The final prints have an uncanny three-dimensional realism, yet also look like watercolor in places, bleeding into the paper. There are a few more on my website.