Dont miss an immersive art installation co-produced by 做厙輦⑹ at Highfield Hall and Gardens in Falmouth. evokes both the brilliant biodiversity of coral reefs and the real existential threat they face, in her large-scale, intricately hand-sculpted work. The exhibit closes on October 31. Below, Mattison reflects on the muses that led her to fall in love with coral reefs and to dedicate herself to rendering them in sculpture and, through advocacy, preserving them from extinction.
What is a coral reef, from your perspective as an ecologist and artist?
A coral reef, to me, is a lot like a city. Its an exquisitely diverse ecosystem of different species that all play a role. Being in the middle of a truly healthy, vibrant coral reef is like being in the middle of Times Square, pre-Covid, with horns honking and food smells, and all kinds of people and creatures running around. You have no idea what's coming at you next, but everyone in that ecosystem plays a role, and you notice when some of those species are missing. I've seen healthy coral reefs and I've seen unhealthy ones, and the contrast is stark. The first time I dove at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, it was just thriving with corals and invertebrates and all these huge sharks and snappers and predatory fish bumping past me. When I went back nine years later, it was coincidentally during the 2016 major bleaching event when 93% of the northern section of the Great Barrier Reef bleached. Not only were all the corals completely bleached white, which was shocking and devastating, but all the sharks and predatory fish were gone. It was like a ghost town. The change in the reef from colorful and diverse and having a lot of movement, to sterile, ghostly white skeletons of bleached corals I try to highlight that in my work.
When did you start to combine marine biology and art?
Growing up in San Francisco, I was fascinated with exploring tide pools along the California coast and peeking below the waters surface to see what faceless creatures were under there. I was also a really artistic kid. I took a marine biology class in high school and was also in a ceramics class at the time, and it felt natural to start sculpting what I was studying: sea squirts and corals and flatworms, all kinds of invertebrates that were so alien-looking but were from our own backyard. That was exciting for me. I spent a semester in Australia during college, and thats when I literally dove in and fell head over heels in love with coral reefs. I just went all in. I took reef ecology classes and a ceramics class; I joined the dive club and went to the Great Barrier Reef. Simultaneously, I was heartbroken to learn in detail how climate change was expected to devastate reefs. I felt like I was falling in love and losing that love at the same time. That was a turning point in deciding to dedicate my career to inspiring coral reef conservation through my art.
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I decided I wanted to create a masterpiece. I didn't know what that meant, but I knew I needed to find a graduate school that would allow me to combine this interdisciplinary set of interests in a powerful way. Brown was the perfect place for me; I received an education in marine conservation biology and policy and took half of my coursework at the Rhode Island School of Design. The culmination of my thesis project at Brown was my first large-scale ceramic sculptural coral reef work. I interviewed my heroes in marine research, conservation, and art, and they inspired its design. It became obvious that I had to create something enormous, if I wanted to communicate how big the problem was. I started by building as many corals as I could and in the end I decided to fit them all together, which ended up being a complicated puzzle because I had to completely engineer this apparatus to hold everything together. I learned a lot! But that work is still on display at the headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, DC.