Statement - Experiments in Aquaculture Series
The oyster begins its life in a planktonic stage: as a tiny particle drifting aimlessly through the sea. Should it manage to avoid the clutches of predators, it evolves into a “pediveliger”—a larva with a foot—and spends this period of its life hopping around in search of a permanent home. When it finds (and how does it know?) a suitable residence—a wooden piling, rock, or a bit of oyster shell, perhaps—it attaches permanently, and transforms into a matured state. The sessile (forever immobile) bivalve now sets to work sucking in gallons of water, extracting nutrients to build its shell layer by layer, from the inside out. Like a tree, or a painting, or maybe even a person, an oyster shell tells the story of its constant coming into being. Its rings and layers tell its age, its shape tells of the surrounding objects that influenced its growth, and its barnacles, scars and crevasses tell of any hardships and tribulations to have befallen it.
My father and I began cultivating oysters several years ago off the dock at my grandfather’s cove-side house in Greenport, NY. These magnificent rock creatures hang in netted sacks off the pilings, bobbing along with the tide. I am always sad to leave after spending time in this place. The crack of the water as we haul the bags of tiny bodies onto the wooden dock, the scurrying away of ne’er-do-well crabs, the flip flopping of tiny shrimp, and the hooting of the gulls bounce through my body as I drive by the cornfields, then box stores, then industrial moon colonies, then urban streets, until I turn the key and plunk myself down and find that I’m back in city, back home.
When I come into my studio, my hand ripples with the wet and trembling energy of these creatures, the asymmetry of their bodies, and the meteorological atmospheres contained within their shells—storm clouds moving across sun against a sleek white horizon.
My father and I began cultivating oysters several years ago off the dock at my grandfather’s cove-side house in Greenport, NY. These magnificent rock creatures hang in netted sacks off the pilings, bobbing along with the tide. I am always sad to leave after spending time in this place. The crack of the water as we haul the bags of tiny bodies onto the wooden dock, the scurrying away of ne’er-do-well crabs, the flip flopping of tiny shrimp, and the hooting of the gulls bounce through my body as I drive by the cornfields, then box stores, then industrial moon colonies, then urban streets, until I turn the key and plunk myself down and find that I’m back in city, back home.
When I come into my studio, my hand ripples with the wet and trembling energy of these creatures, the asymmetry of their bodies, and the meteorological atmospheres contained within their shells—storm clouds moving across sun against a sleek white horizon.