New Ecologies

I wander rivers and coastlines, observing novel plant and seaweed communities thriving in distressed lands and waters. Nature is constant change and movement, and its plants are responding in abundance to how humans have degraded the Earth.

Collected plant fibers and seaweeds turn into paper pulp, which coats discarded electrical and communication wire. I make many small, abstract sculptures of plant forms and water. In a stream of consciousness, I connect the fragments to reveal new amalgamations of spiritual resonance.

These sculptures reflect processes of growth and new systems of relationships. They change and move as they give opportunity for healing, calm, and nourishment in a crisis-filled world.

Poughkeeste Coastline

10 x 8 x 1 feet, flax, seaweed, paper mulberry, pigments, leftover wire, 2026

I kept visiting a particular coastal site over the winter months, without knowing why. There were skeletons of a beach plant, bladderwrack seaweed holding fast to rocks in low tide flats, cold wind, multi-colored dune grasses, and a magical light to the ever-changing waters. Each visit, the place was different. Each visit, I keep changing too. This sculpture also keeps changing over the months.

Much of the translucent handmade paper is actually an innovative seaweed paper-bioplastic material. It lets light pass through, and shrinks and hardens into unexpected shapes.

Grateloupia Saccharina

75 x 22 x 17 inches, flax, seaweed, salt marsh grass, common reed, leftover wire, 2026

Grateloupia turuturu is slippery to touch, flat-bladed and a remarkable magenta-red. At Rome Point several years ago, I found an abundance of this seaweed, which comes from the coasts of China, Japan, and Korea. Now, I find only a few.

Similarly flat-bladed, sugar kelp (Saccharina latissima) is also very rare to find growing wild in Narragansett Bay nowadays.

These two species started blending together in the papermaking studio, not quite one but not the other either. Emotionally, I have felt the same way. Not quite white, but not quite Asian either. The red forms are made of local red seaweed bioplastic paper, an experimental biomaterial made of agar and paper pulp.

COASTAL ENTANGLEMENTS

48 x 35 x 36 inches, seaweed, flax, abaca, pigments, leftover wire, 2026

Walking along one of Buzzard's Bay / Poughkeeste coastline's rocky beaches, there was a clump of common reed, goldenrod, and a few other plants growing closely together. As if they were sprouting from one point in space, then expanding outwards. "Coastal Entanglements" is the first study of these shoreline moments, of fiber and plants co-mingling. The green forms are made of green sea fingers seaweed paper.

Sargassum Chondrus Heterosiphonia

62 x 48 x 42 inches, flax, seaweed, paper mulberry, leftover wire, 2026

There is no seaweed called "sargassum chondrus heterosiphonia." Here I blend the names, shapes, and materials of sugar kelp, Irish moss, and a so-called "invasive" red seaweed into one united form. Not individual and separate, but dissolving into each other, becoming whole. A summer of swimming off Atlantic beaches and rocky shorelines inspired me. The time also yielded red seaweed for making bioplastic, a gelatinous material that I mix with paper pulp, a new biocomposite innovation.

Moose Hill Flora

43 x 28 x 14 inches, flax, milkweed, pigments, leftover electrical wire

I became more intimate with Moose Hill Farm (a Trustees property in Sharon, MA) as I hiked forest trails and explored the meadows and corners. American chestnut lives here, amongst goldenrod, mosses, meadow grasses, common milkweed, and more.

American Chestnut Moss (left), American Chestnut Blight (right)

28 x 30 x 32 inches, corn husk, flax, milkweed, pigments, leftover electrical wire. 2 of 3 sculptures

Did you know that American chestnut was once abundant in forests across eastern North American? About a century ago, a blight rendered the tree species functionally extinct. The forested slopes at Moose Hill Farm in Sharon, MA are home to several extremely rare, mature-sized American chestnut trees.

Reed Seed Fibers

21 x 22 x 10 inches, flax, salt marsh grass, pigments, thread, 2026

COMMON REED MOVEMENTS

62 x 36 x 4 in, reused electrical wire, artist-made paper pulp from sediment, jewelweed, abaca, flax, common reed, 2025

Warm fall months meant plenty of kayaking. I was drawn to Big River because it was a quiet, still, place—removed from modern life, though you go deep under the I-95 highway at one point. Going with the water flow, I observed the long lines of pond lilies, pickerelweed with spade-like leaves, and 15 ft. tall common reed alongside cattail.

Codium fragile and Lost Kelp of Narragansett Bay

40 x 50 x 3 in, reused electrical wire, Codium fragile seaweed and flax paper pulp, 2025

Kelp was once found wild-growing all the way up to Providence, RI in Narragansett Bay. Codium fragile is a so-called “invasive” Asian seaweed, increasingly present in the Bay, and originating from the coasts of Japan.