ELEPHANT BED SERIES

Private and public collections including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art (DC) and the Whatcom Museum (WA)
2003 - 2011

Related articles:
Whatcom Museum Exhibition Catalog 2010
Fabrica Exhibition Catalog (English) 2010
Fabrica Exhibition Catalog (French) 2010
Sculpture 2010
Seattle Times 2011
Stranger 2010

Six years before the Elephant Bed was installed at Fabrica in Brighton (UK), the smaller sculpture, Shoal (Bone Shoal Sonance), was included in a solo exhibition at Davidson Galleries (WA). Both sculptures are inspired by coccolithiphore, a type of phytoplankton that blooms in large masses just below the surface of the sea. Coccolithiphore come in thousands of variations of shape and size. Shoal (Bone Shoal Sonance) is inspired by sets of coccolithiphore bonded together during formation as well as imagining the subtle sound these shells would make as they separated from one another and slowly sink to the sea floor. The drawing Brighton Pier imagines an alternate installation for Fabrica with a large monolithic sculpture tethered to a prominent pier. This sculpture would have been made with a different variation of corn-based plastic that would disintegrate more gradually through exposure to moisture than the Elephant Bed sculptures did. Rather than disintegrating in seconds, this sculpture would have degraded over the course of several weeks––like slow melting ice.

IMAGES

Elephant Bed Series, private and public collections including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art (DC) and the Whatcom Museum (WA), 2003 – 2011.