Clamming

Study of a clam. Oil on paper.

John and I are preparing for a two person show in Bath, Maine this summer.

When I begin a new body of work, I like to do a bunch of research. It helps me decide how to approach the subject matter. In my installation last year, the images and symbols I cut out of the paper panels represent ways that I’m incentivized to let systemic racism continue. I examined my relationship to structural racism and its history, and I attempted to present that with some critical distance.

What, you may ask, does that have to do with clamming?

As I walked along Popham Beach in Maine, I took pictures of seaweed and other debris washed up on the shore. I found myself drawing a parallel between the ocean depositing items on the shore and my own attempts to pull ideas out of my mind so that I can observe them rather than simply flowing along in the currents of my thoughts.

On Old Orchard Beach, it was clam shells that caught my attention. I know, as a New Englander, how important shellfishing is to the coastal economy. The health of Maine’s clams is tied to the health, and the temperature, of the ocean. Invasive European green crabs eat both tiny shellfish and their habitat of eelgrass. The crabs flourish in warmer water, and the Gulf of Maine is warming three times faster than the global average.

As I learn about these issues, I’ve been drawing and painting clams. I work out my compositions to make the clams loom large in the foreground, while the traditional views of lighthouses, jetties and piers recede into the horizon. I want to emphasize the simple form of the clam; filled with precious life when it is tightly closed, splayed like a book when it is open. I love the dichotomy of the living organism and the desire to read it as a symbol.

Observing the clam as a cultural as well as an organic object, allows me to view the iconic coast of Maine in a new way, through the lens of this small (and delicious) mollusk.