EXPERT ENCLOSURE

In one direction, miles of twisting and turning metal tubing stretch across the horizon and toward the sky before abruptly ending in an ominous flare stack, more reminiscent of an all-seeing sorcerer’s eye than a mundane burning off of excess gases. Opposite this lies a warm, salty, shallow, and seemingly infinite sea, dotted with oil platforms and fishing boats. I spent my childhood where these two environments touch, shaking ocean treasures out from the stranded red sargassum that flooded the dunes. There, stuck between land and sea on the brown-water beaches of Coastal Texas, I pondered worlds of sand, seahorse, and seaweed submerged beyond the shadow of the chemical plants. This makes the Gulf of Mexico an integral part of who I am as a person and, if it is possible to disentangle such things, as a scholar too.

In the seven years I spent researching the history of marine geosciences in the Gulf and preparing my doctoral dissertation, I produced only one thematically adjacent piece of creative work. This 18 × 24 mixed-media piece is double-sided and layered in a way that not all of its elements are visible; rather, they are built upon one another. When it felt like all my energy had gone into writing, I often found myself empty, vacantly staring at a blank piece of paper… meditating on this place that made me who I am and that I had come to know so deeply, with absolutely nothing to give. I went about adding a little something to it in the moments (and there were many) when I was paralyzed with writer’s block.

Over the course of two years, in between moves and the precarity of life as a graduate student, I would add a topographic line here, a layer of color there, the marks of scientific mediation inspired by time with archival materials, a bending of the ocean’s bottom, writing the sea onto outer space. With all those moves, I would sometimes find myself working with only a mechanical pencil or a ballpoint pen, completely out of white paint, and often in poor lighting. But all the better, because I ended up with a piece that is in line with my creative philosophy, imperfect and not to scale. Yet these imprecise, messy moments brought me closer to seeing and knowing the Gulf the way my historical actors did.

If you received a scrap of the Gulf:

This piece was not primed or sealed, nor was it designed to stand the test of time. It was meant to be enjoyed, and then to die… the way that cut flowers do. You are welcome to try and preserve it if/how you like. The length of time it will take for this scrap to reach its last day depends on where you place it and how you store it.