In 2018 I was lucky enough to go to Antarctica, on the sailing ship Bark Europa. The first step is to cross the infamous Drake Passage, the churning waters that, as part of the Southern Ocean, separate Antarctica from everything else on Earth: the trees, the flowers, the terrestrial animals, and crucially, the humans (until relatively recent history). We landed in what felt like another world, and I was smitten.

That first landing burns in my mind. Dark, smooth, wet rocks formed a beach peppered with young male fur seals, resting and intermittently sparring. The narrow peninsula was capped on one end by a craggy rock spire, and on the other by a small electric-blue glacier. A few penguins waddled about or preened.

Subsequent landings were like different recipes created with the same ingredients: rock, ice, seal, penguin. Sometimes the rocks were rough boulders. Sometimes tiny intricate icebergs floated within arm’s reach and dotted the beach. Sometimes penguin droppings stained the whole shore pinkish brown. The penguins were Gentoos, or Chinstraps, or Adelies. The Antarctic fur seals were occasionally joined by Crabeaters or Weddells or even the fearsome Leopard Seal.

Some of the other travelers tired of the endless penguin colonies (and their smells in particular) but my enthusiasm never waned. One night while drifting off to sleep I had a hypnagogic vision: my mind’s eye was filled with a living wallpaper of what I’d been experiencing, an infinite Antarctic landscape of rocks, fur seals, and penguins. They hopped on and off rocks and hauled themselves up. They chased each other, preened or groomed, and slept.

What Antarctica gifted me was a glimpse of a natural world without human influence (an illusion to be sure, since there we were), something I’ve longed for since I was a child. (In elementary school my class was asked what single wish we would ask of a genie; mine was for humans and everything we’ve done to disappear from the world.) 

Through my artwork I create a surreal version of that vision. I focus on the animals’ gestures and the interactions between them to emphasize their personhood and inner lives while critiquing humanity’s narcissism. Penguins and seals emerge as reliefs from classic forms, nonchalantly co-opting these man-made vessels for their own purposes. At times I incorporate religious motifs and architectural elements (particularly borrowing from Gothic and Baroque Catholic cathedrals) to further exalt seemingly random individual animals. How arrogant we are to assume that it was man made in God’s image, rather than a fur seal!