This year is a marker: my life before and after the death of my mother.  My work up until now centred on environmental issues, specifically those that affect marine ecosystems, and while I am exploring the relationship between horseshoe crabs, Red Knots and humans, I am for the first time injecting a personal history into the work.  My practice has always been informed by my childhood by the sea and my career as a marine science teacher, but now I am using artifacts and personal memories directly in the imagery.  Sorting through my mother’s belongings meant looking through all the old family photographs, reminiscing about what it was like living in Atlantic Beach. The vagueness of memories, recalling certain specific events and feelings is juxtaposed with a generality of emotion and feelings about a time that no longer exists. 

While still using printmaking as the basis for making work, I have expanded from 2D flat, mount on the wall, prints to 3D objects and prints that have moved out into the space.  The scientific narrative remains the same, but now the protagonists are part of a personal story, a mixture of scientific facts and a more ephemeral accounting and recounting of memories. The printmaking process in my previous work was and still is part of the narrative, but I have expanded the concept to include the materials upon which I am printing.  I am exploring installation and display in this new work as an extension of the conceptual part of my work.  

Horseshoe crab blood has become a valuable commodity, worth approximately £15k/litre to the pharmaceutical companies that use it as the basis of quality control for any product that is placed inside the human body i.e.  vaccines, hip replacement prosthetics.  Naturally, the blood is intrinsically invaluable to the horseshoe crab, but as a result of the research of Dr. Frederik Bang, the blood has a specific monetary value imposed by its exigent usefulness to Big Pharma.  I decided to create copper coinage that tells the story of the medical use of horseshoe crab blood. Exploring the concept of value, I chose copper because, besides being the metal of choice for etching clean, clear, detailed prints, and as such is the most expensive plate metal, it’s the metal that gives the horseshoe crab blood it’s sky-blue hue. In their essay “Money: An Alternative Story”, Tymoigne and Wray describe “The ideal medium of exchange is a commodity whose value is intrinsic, and the value of each marketed commodity is denominated in the medium of exchange through the social forces of supply and demand.”  Whereas the origins of money are still debated, it seems that money-things developed independently in multiple cultures all over the globe for diverse reasons and uses.

I relate the work to the use of money to pay debts in order to prevent “blood feuds” and the payment of “blood money” to the unintended sacrificial value of non-anthropocentric life and balance.  Copper, due to it being malleable and ductile was used in Africa as a payment material for market goods, but also became the currency of the Atlantic Slave Trade.  The horseshoe crabs in my narrative literally pay blood money, and perhaps in exchange, they have become a protected species.  Although, their protection is necessary because of human exploitation, so the transaction is unbalanced from the start.  The term slavery refers to humans, and in a patriarchal society all other creatures are considered resources.  In my work I question the concept of the valuation of life, human or not.

The imagery on the coins denotes the players in my narrative, both scientific and personal, and the box I built for their display creates a book quality from which the story can be read.  I describe the coins as a horde in the title, giving the objects a place from which they have sprung. Imagery on coinage usually is used to denote the value by mass of the metal as this was an easy way to eliminate the necessity of scales.   David Graebner explains, “using irregular metal ingots is easier than barter, but wouldn’t standardizing the units – say, stamping pieces of metal with uniform designations guaranteeing weight and fineness, in different denominations – make things easier still?” (Graebner, 2011). This numerical value was mostly not depicted on the coin itself. The designs often drew from local mythology, plants, animals, geographic features, etc…. They even served as advertisement when exchange between city-states occurred. (Tymoigne, Wray, 2005).

The process of creating the stamps for the coins is rooted in printmaking. I had no previous experience with jewellery-making, so I was completely out of my comfort zone. I etched the images into steel, cut the steel stamps out, and then pressure stamped a copper disc on both sides to create embossed images on both sides.  Each coin contains an image from my narrative along with relevant dates or values.  For example, the coin with the Red Knot contains the longitudinal coordinates of their epic migration on one side and an image of the horseshoe crab larvae with the number of migratory birds on the other side.  I rode the school bus daily over the Atlantic Beach Bridge to Public School ~#1 in Lawrence.  A silent busload of children listened intently as the bus-driver played the New York Mets baseball game on the radio.  Other coins contain images of the bridge, the toll ticket, the Mets logo, the bus, all with data like the bridge toll, the year the Mets won the World Series, the bus route, etc…

The fate of the Red Knots, the migratory birds that fuel up on horseshoe crab larvae on their 14,000km journey is the focus of the screen prints I created.  The balance between the species is documented as being negatively affected by the harvesting of the crabs.  I chose Chinese Wenzhou as the paper on which I printed the images of the birds because of its translucency. This quality represents “the mists of time” and memory when viewed at different angles, and the fragility of relationships.  I built a set of two frames for the prints in order to hang them one behind the other with a space between the two frames wide enough to walk through.  When the viewer either walks through the space or passes adjacent to the prints, they catch the breeze of the movement and gently move themselves, like a ripple effect.  The images of the birds can be “made out” when looking directly at the series, not clearly, but definitely there, much like how memories exist.  Hanging them in the space rather than in a series against the wall invites the viewer to explore the prints, walk through them even. The unintentionally generated movement represents the unforeseen consequences of human activity on the biodiversity of our planet.  Sometimes the balance within ecosystems can adjust and survive, and sometimes the change is too radical to overcome. 

My work this year is ever evolving, and I feel that I am taking on a new challenge.  Layering the pieces with my own history and feelings while linking to the environmental issues that are important to me creates work with deeper meaning.  I consider the move to installation rather than a flat series of images helps to create an environment for the work and becomes part of the work.  I intend to further explore this manner of creating work.