Hanging Out at the Marine Station

It's the second stage of my adventure. I have moved across the bay to Norris Point. I am spending five days in residence here at the Marine Station. To say that this is pure bliss for me is to understate it. Even though I am not on an official artist residency here, I have been given the same privileges to explore and create with free access to the collections and scholarly material. 

I arrived yesterday and met a PhD student who showed me around. Lanthika is a student in the Boreal Ecosystems and Agriculture Sciences Program at Grenfell, Memorial University. He shares my enthusiasm for the creatures and the collections here and we had fun exploring. One of the things I have been interested in is the tiny little ecosystems that exist within small structures such as coralline algae. Lanthika showed me an example of this. You can see a starfish and a young sea urchin who are using this structure as protection.

He also showed me how brittle stars use the coralline structures. The strands you see coming out of the algae are the arms of the brittle stars:

Here you can see what a brittle star looks like when it isn't hiding.

This is Virginia, the Wolf fish.

You might remember the Mermaid's Purse that I found on the beach in Trout River. Here is what the egg casing looks like while the tiny skate is developing:

Lanthika and I also had a chance to look at a collection of marine animal bones. We laid them out on a table in the lab and I have been photographing them today. This kind of exploration may or may not lead to specific artworks, but it is essential to my overall practice.

These are discs that sit between vertebrae of a spinal column. (I think. If I am wrong, please leave a comment and I will correct myself.)

Vertebrae on a marine chart of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Thank you, Lanthika!