FullFathomFive

In late August/early September 2025, I engaged in a collaborative project with the Wellfleet Conservation Trust and Farm Projects. The project consisted of a solo show at Farm, which ran concurrently with an outdoor exhibit of work distributed along the Herring River Overlook Trail, a mile-long loop in the woods off Chequessett Road managed by the Trust. The name of the project, and the body of work, is FullFathomFive, a phrase from Shakespeare’s The Tempest describing a shipwreck, and consists of oil paintings on found driftwood. The size and shape of the artworks varies considerably from piece to piece, but all depict the ocean and the sky, similar to the paintings in my earlier Space in a Box series. The Space in a Box work was focused on a tension between the centrifugal energy of the water and the centripetal force of the wood box enclosing it. This work also juxtaposes the ethereal water/sky/light element with the timeworn physicality of the wood and rusted iron, but fuses the two in a more harmonious relationship, a meditation on the mind/body dichotomy. The project is commemorated by a book edited by Susie Nielsen and published by Farm Projects that documents the exhibit and the collaborative experience.