My art making is an extensive process that is saturated in time and ritual. While it is easy to assume that my work is about oysters, it is actually about ideas of place and nature, specifically St. Mary’s. My connection to the landscape has led me to consider how I develop a personal relationship with nature—moments of time and place—through collection. Collecting is a habit I find to be a natural human reaction. We as humans have an internal ache to understand objects and connect to the tangible. In many ways I believe that is a foundation for making art; to make emotions, relationships, thoughts and concepts concrete. That sense of concreteness is important in my own work; it allows me to make apparent how I am connecting to the world and understanding my own relationship with St. Mary’s. People and places are both impressionable; not only have I left indentations upon the shoreline of the river here, but the shoreline has indented upon me. To remember this importance, I collect oyster shells. At other important places I have visited in my lifetime, I have also collected—rocks, coral, shells, leaves—all have found their way from their natural, original location and accumulated in my hands, pockets, and shelves.

The ideas of accumulation and subtraction have become important concepts within my work that develop both conceptually and formally through my process and/or use of multiples. It is important that I am repeating actions as I make my art work. Tedium has become a friend that I have learned to welcome during my extensive process for completing an artwork. As I recreate the oyster shell, I am rediscovering my connection to a place and experience of walking alone along a shoreline, meditating on place. Perhaps I am frustratingly attempting to re-immerse myself in the eternal sensation of time that is present along the river, the process of geology. With each new drawing, print, and embossing, I might be arriving a little closer to understanding the oyster shell and its importance.

Scale has become important in my work as I focus so narrowly on the shell. Robert Smithson, an American earthwork artist from the late 1960s and the 1970s relates my attitude on scale in writing about his most famous artwork Spiral Jetty (1970). Smithson writes, “size determines an object, but scale determines art. A crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system. Scale depends on one’s capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception.”1 I am using this understanding in my art-making every time I turn to the oyster shell. I am asking it to be not just a dismissive shell, but a world in itself, a connection to the transient, a history of natural processes of creation and death, a bit of ephemeral data, a romantic link to emotion, and evidence to a relationship between body and land or and water. I know this may seem like a lot to ask from an oyster shell, but I have learned that the complexities and layers within these valves have been worthwhile in understanding and discovering.

For that reason it was important for me to learn about the structure of the oyster shell, the formation of the shell and its relation to being part of the anatomy of a living creature. The shell itself is formed through the secretion of crystals and the shell grows through an incremental thickening that occurs over the lifespan of an oyster. Once the oyster dies, the shell no longer grows but is subjected entirely to the forces of erosion and weathering. I already knew that oysters grow upon each other, clustered together, forming a collection of sorts (the nature of collection is already an inherent part of the culture of oysters). Some of my information on the shell was researched formally and other information came from talking with others or from my own observation.

For some things, I did not require a scientific understanding. For instance, I had no need for a biological assumption for why the inside of the shell is smooth as opposed to the rough, flaky, layered outside of the shell, but I did need a textural understanding of this just through touching and interacting with the shells. It was important that I use the information I gathered in my process of making my art because that infuses my work with more meaning, conceptually impregnates the work with an understanding of the object it was recreating.