Cetacea
For an entire year, at the end of my parenting journey, just before my child left for college, I’d been captivated by a series of monoprints I was working on, a medium that felt like a dance between the deliberate and the accidental. More specifically, I’d been intrigued by a certain shape, a small body or figure that I couldn't quite identify, that emerged from my process in dozens of my prints. Each one I pulled seemed to whisper a secret from deep within, yet I remained oblivious to the underlying truth. The images that emerged were a reverberation of something instinctual—a butterfly-like shape that I called a “little monster,” both fluid and fragmentary.
The recurring motif in my work for the full year felt like a conversation with my body at its most core level, reflecting something hidden just below the surface and pointing to the impending changes happening in my life.
Then came that week in late June — news broke of the largest dolphin stranding in U.S. history, in my quaint coastal town of Wellfleet. Though most were rescued, the marsh at the end of the street became dotted with the bodies of the majestic creatures that did not survive. Seven dolphins washed ashore, their presence both surreal and haunting.
That same week I received my own fateful diagnosis at the hospital, and the words "thyroid disease" hung in the air like a dense fog. It felt as if my internal struggle had met the external world in a dark synchrony. The grief I felt for the dolphins echoed through my diagnosis; both were manifestations of neglect and trauma—of nature and self. In the weeks that followed, I tried to recover, and when well enough, I walked around the island at the end of the street passing their bodies in the grasses and on the sand.
I ventured out each day, eventually documenting the dolphin’s decay, heavy with grief for the lives lost and the beauty of the creatures fading before my eyes. Just as I was wrestling with my own physical decline, here lay evidence of a larger ecological tragedy.
My prints from the past year took on new meaning, as I began to realize the shape that was emerging was actually the shape of a thyroid. Somehow, an intuitive message had been sent and finally received. The timing felt like a dark synchrony—grief within and without. In the following weeks, I began intertwining the shapes of my thyroid-induced anxieties with the images of the decaying forms of the dolphins. The art became a visceral exploration of loss and illness, bound together in a cycle of transformation.
Through this act of creation, I began to process the intertwining narratives of my own illness, changes in my role as a parent, and the environmental catastrophe that unfolded before me. These pieces became a testament to resilience—a reminder that even in decay, there was beauty and transformation to be found. My work became a visual dialogue between personal illness and ecological loss. These hybrid images explored the collapse and resilience of both body and planet. Through this merging, I found a way to process transformation, grief, and the mysterious ways we intuit what’s to come.