A mosaicist walks into a research station in a national park…

This blog post is months late (apologies!)…life just kind of took over. But now I’ve got my butt parked on the couch recovering from surgery (the story is in the footnotes here) and I’ve got nothing but time to get this out into the world. 

For two weeks this September, I got the chance to participate in what was essentially my dream art gig: an art and science residency at an aquarium / research station inside a national park. Huge shout-out to Grenfell Art Gallery, Creative Gros Morne, and Bonne Bay Aquarium and Research Station (BBARS) for organizing this whole amazing experience.

I was one of six artists selected to be in the residency’s inaugural cohort. While our individual residency periods were scattered over the summer / fall months, I was lucky enough to be there at the same time as two of the other artists (Tanja Geis and Janet Davis). What a gift to get to learn about their practices, see them at work, and see how their artistic brains processed and responded to the environment we were all immersed in.

The loose plan I had pitched in my application was to make (roughly daily) small mosaics, just little sketches really, inspired by what I was learning, seeing, and experiencing. However, the organizers reinforced several times that there were absolutely no expectations for my time there. My only job was to be inspired and follow my curiosity. If I didn’t produce a single thing, that was completely fine. It was a little unsettling to have so much freedom, especially in contrast to the symposium in Rosarito just a few months prior (which was also wonderful, but there were definitely expectations for those two weeks!). 

Within 30 minutes of arriving at BBARS in Norris Point, Newfoundland, I had held a 12-pound, 96-year-old lobster, met a top hat-wearing sea urchin, and learned I would have 24/7 access to the public aquarium. And within the hour, I was out foraging around town. I brought absolutely zero materials with me. I wanted anything I used to be local, since that’s a key part of getting to know a place.

Important disclaimer: while I did forage in and around Norris Point, the town is not actually part of the national park (although it’s surrounded by it). Any excursions into the park did NOT include foraging. This is a rule that I take very seriously. None of my materials are ever taken from protected areas. 

Over the next two weeks I stayed fairly close to “home”, partly because there’s something nice about slowly getting to know a place, partly because I want to save my exploring for when R can be there too. But I did get to go out on the BBARS boat a few times to explore Bonne Bay (one time I got to help haul comb jellies from 100m down!) and also did a few small roadtrips into the park with my fellow artists. 

Immediately I fell in love with the rocks. I mean, how could I not? And the plastic on the beach. Ugly, sobering, but also full of inspiration. In my first foraging trip to Wild Cove—one of my most frequented beaches—I kept finding fishing tags. Not really knowing why, I picked up every one I saw. And I kept doing that each time I was out. By the end I had accumulated 227 tags. 

I couldn’t explain why I was so taken with the tags. It certainly wasn’t the colour (ha!), and it wasn’t the shape (so flat and regular). But there was something… When the folks from the Atlantic Healthy Oceans Initiative (AHOI – winner of the best acronym award) saw my pile of tags, they told me about a research lab that actually uses the data from the tags in their work. In a nutshell: the tag tells them where it originated and the year it was issued, and then they also know where and when it was found, so they can use them as a proxy for understanding flows of ocean plastics more generally. The kicker: the lab—Max Liboiron’s Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR lab)—is one whose work I have long admired thanks to my day job, and now I got to send them data! I was helping do science! 

I also became quite captivated by one of the invasive species of the area—coffin box bryozoan—which I would find covering (mostly) seaweed that had washed up. It was beautiful and destructive and you know that is the sweet spot for me. I even got to look at it (and some other beach finds) under the microscope! SCIENCE!  

The more I explored the beaches, the more I was drawn to the chaos of the wrack line, where seaweed, rocks, driftwood, trash, shells, and more were woven together. This became a sort of point of reference in many of the little sketches I did while I was there. 

Some pieces I made were purely for fun, just playing around and enjoying the things I was finding. Like making a shale sea urchin. Or playing with assorted non-shale stones I picked up. Or filling an intact lobster tag with bits of lobster claw and stone. Sort of a way to let my mind wander and process while my hands stayed busy with easy work.

But most pieces riffed on that interplay of materials in the wrack line. Wrapping hard materials (stone, driftwood) in soft ones (washed-up rope, seaweed – both regular and covered by coffin box bryozoan), mixing and matching natural and human-made materials. And learning important lessons, like seaweed and thinset don’t mix (to be fair, I could have guessed this, but it was the only adhesive I had with me, so I threw caution to the wind). And learning that I don’t want to use the fishing tags as-is—I need to find a way to transform them (there were some initial experiments involving a BBQ and a tin can…).

As part of the residency, I’ll be making a piece that will travel back to BBARS next year to be displayed alongside those of my fellow artists in residence. The idea for it is semi-solidified in my brain, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise. As you may have guessed, it will be influenced by that natural/human-made contrast, the wrack line, and the data from the fishing tags (science!). It will also likely be shaped by thoughts of relationships and changes (big and small) over time (short and long) – a mental rabbit hole that the work and comments of fellow artist Tanja Geis sent me down. Anyway, stay tuned for that in the new year!