My Story

While growing up in the early 1970s on the beaches and coves of Maine, I spent countless hours snorkeling and skin diving – raiding lobster traps, getting sunburnt, practicing piracy. I was always amazed at the majesty and beauty of the fields of seaweed that carpeted the underwater world just within reach of the beach. On the beach, the same grace that opened up underwater, the colors, the delicacy of the weed was lost – rotting, clumped, disregarded. As a nine-year old boy, it saddened me that such elegance was lost, ignored.

While at university, I read an article on how nineteenth century naturalists, in their hurry to identify and name all the world’s species, had developed a process to capture seaweed. While on vacation on Peaks Island, Maine in 2000, after my daughter Lillian was born, I began to develop my own method of arresting seaweed in their fragility, their uniqueness, brilliance. 

I am now a retired educator and have been beachcombing the beaches, inlets and coves of Maine ensnaring the seaweed of its shores for the past two years. Each piece is an authentic fingerprint of Maine; a fingerprint of the mostly ignored and unseen.