Heart of the Ocean

Love, the ocean knows, is not a soft thing. It is salt and pressure and the grinding of stone against stone until something smooth and round and new emerges. I made this piece in the months after a loss — not a loss I will name here, because the work names it better than words can. I went to the shore earlier than usual, while it was still dark, and I worked by feel along the tide line, picking up loops of kelp by the weight of them in my hands.

The heart form came to me fully formed, the way things do when you are not trying to think. I had the wire armature in my hands before I understood what I was making. The kelp loops went on one by one, each one pressed tight against the last, building density from the inside out. I worked for three days without stopping except to sleep. The driftwood mount — sun-bleached, salt-white, smooth as old bone — I found on the second day, as if placed there for me. Perhaps it was.

When I finished, I put the piece against the wall and sat with it for a long time. It looked back at me the way the ocean looks back at you when you stand at the water's edge in the early morning: without comfort, without consolation, and without cruelty. Simply witnessing. Simply present. The dark organic matter of the kelp against the sun-worn whiteness of the driftwood told the whole story: the living against the given-up, the dark and dense against the light and scoured clean.

Heart of the Ocean has found its home, but it has not left the world. Commission enquiries for pieces in this spirit are always welcome. The ocean has more hearts in it than you might think.