SALMON COAST FIELD STATION
In the summer of 2023 I spent three weeks at a remote salmon research station in the Broughton Archipelago in British Columbia. My intention was to immerse myself in the ocean, in the presence of ecological research, and in making art.
Half of my time was spent supporting the research being conducted by the PhD candidate researchers, and the other half of my time I spent making art about what I was seeing and experiencing. I hauled seine nets, ID’d salmon species, measured kelp habitat growth and filled a watercolour sketchbook with all that I was taking in. To give back to Salmon Coast, I created art for them in the form of a juvenile salmon sticker to promote their research on the correlation between sea lice and salmon health, and a new station sign on the dock.
ARTIST AT SEA in the CARIBBEAN
In the fall of 2017 I joined a Swedish sailboat in Cartagena and spent a month sailing the steel ketch in the Caribbean. Between days at sea in the endless turquoise expanse of the blue crossings beyond Colombia and visiting indigenous communities in the San Blas islands of Panama, I documented and sketched.
With a crew of seven sailors from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and Canada, we shared the duties of cooking, cleaning, sailing and lounging amongst us and took in some of the most colourful sights I’ve ever experienced. These kinds of voyages are invaluable to an artist’s mind - I was so taken with the way time slowed, with eating directly from the sea, and with the experiences of a lifetime - like when Simon caught a reef shark at night and then proceeded to jump overboard to wrap an arm around the shark while delicately removing the rusty hook from it’s mouth… with his hands.
To keep the trip simple, I went with only a small sketchbook, an even smaller travel watercolour painting kit, and my film camera with 12 rolls of film.