On the first day I lived in Northern California, I stood on the beach and stared at a golden-green object washed up on the sand — a shining coil with a perfect bulb at one end. It was, I learned, a strand of kelp, and I remember thinking it would make a really cool tattoo.
I still haven’t gotten that tattoo, nor have I put on a wetsuit to dive into a kelp forest. But in the two years since then, I’ve been immersed in the seaweed’s vital and threatened world, largely because of an ecosystem of researchers and artists who are all leveraging their talents toward its survival.
Coastal California life has blossomed because of kelp. Bull kelp, a bulbous algae that forms a canopy over the water’s surface closer to shore, gilds the West Coast from Alaska to central California. Underwater forests of giant kelp — a different species, lined with leaf-like blades along the whole length of its stipe (or stem) — mix with bull kelp off the Central Coast and dominate the southern coastline down to Baja California, Mexico. From a grip called a holdfast that’s affixed rootlessly to the seafloor, giant kelp can stretch up to 175 feet to touch the surface; even the smaller bull kelp can grow an average of four inches each day. Both of these algae create habitat for all kinds of creatures amid turbulent currents, photosynthesizing carbon-saturated seawater to balance the ocean’s pH.
Few understand the value of these ecosystems, though. We can’t wander through a kelp forest like we might through cathedrals of redwoods, and today, that presents a bit of a PR challenge. The North Coast lost more than 95% of its kelp to interconnected threats, including a catastrophic marine heat wave from 2013 to 2017. Then a wasting disease decimated the sunflower sea star (the primary predator for kelp’s own predator, the purple urchin), and the urchin’s subsequent population boom meant that the spiny creatures devoured the remaining kelp. Now, researchers are struggling to help bull kelp regrow and once again thrive along the coastline. Fortunately, the prognosis is less dire for giant kelp, though rising ocean temperatures are making the environment increasingly inhospitable for the southern species.
Kelp forests are more than essential: They’re gorgeous. And, as the philosopher Elaine Scarry wrote, beauty leads us “to a more capacious regard for the world.” Taking in and touching a beautiful landscape inspires us to act, and even people like me who’ve never kicked below the surface can still marvel at kelp ecosystems, because we have artists.
Kelp art thrives on the West Coast. Videographers Ana Blanco and Natasha Benjamin plunge into exhausting swells at every opportunity to film the “sequoias of the sea”; ceramicist Leila Al-Hemali crafts spiny coffee mugs mimicking — even glazed with — the overpopulated predatory urchins from the northern seafloor; students at Cal State Channel Islands create installations of kelp made entirely from the vivid debris found in waterways; and cyanotype artist Oriana Poindexter, a former fisheries-scientist, dives for giant kelp, fanning its fronds into huge blue-on-blue prints.
Taking in and touching a beautiful landscape inspires us to act, and even people like me who’ve never kicked below the surface can still marvel at kelp ecosystems, because we have artists.
Inside the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, kids scream, “In here, in here!” as they encounter Poindexter’s imaginary kelp forest, darting through the fronds’ blue shadows on silk. The exhibit she co-curated, called Hold Fast, is designed to submerge the San Diego aquarium’s visitors in kelp habitat.
Poindexter’s fellow Southern California artist, Dwight Hwang, printed fish that rely on healthy kelp, using the Japanese method of gyotaku to cover the walls with the chaos and movement of the ocean. After living and working in Japan as an animator, Hwang was inspired by the fishermen’s centuries-old method for documenting their catch. He continuously seeks to add more detail, painting fish in ink and pressing their bodies onto paper, creating a stamp of the fish with the shading and light of life underwater. Hwang has printed strands of kelp, too, reveling in the sense of motion it imparts to his ocean scenes.
At the aquarium, Hwang and Poindexter’s creations complement display tanks full of tiny heat-resistant kelp sporophytes, or seedlings, which Mohammad Sedarat, a Ph.D. student at the institution, hopes to plant offshore to foster a more resilient giant kelp bed.
In a world of warming oceans and habitat imbalance, this marriage of art and science may have new stakes. But the work itself is not new on this coastline. In researching a companion archival show at UC San Diego’s Geisel Library called Ebb and Flow, Poindexter combed the school’s archives for renderings of seaweed dating back more than 100 years. Back then, seaweed pressing was seen as an acceptable hobby for women, akin to scrapbooking. Today, however, libraries of meticulously mounted pressings by past collectors, including Ellen Browning Scripps, Eliza Virginia Scripps and botanist Mary Snyder, offer invaluable historical records of California’s algae.
What is it about kelp that connects us so naturally? Devotion to this organism, I think, is not an act of singular obsession; rather, it values an entire network of life. The kelp story is the kind of narrative we’re starved for: the possibility that we are, ourselves, responsible, capable and connected participants in an ecosystem.
That’s at the core for Monique Sonoquie, a basket weaver and educator who is influenced in her work by her ancestors, including the Chumash and Tongva peoples who first lived along California’s coast. A member of the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association, she began weaving with kelp partly in response to the boundaries drawn in colonization that can make it harder for her and other Indigenous people to access materials. She picked up kelp, which has been a traditional material for other cultures around the globe, after encountering a conundrum one day when she was foraging on the beach. With her pockets already full, she spotted some discarded plastic. She didn’t want to just leave there, so she fashioned a basket from bull kelp on the spot to carry out the trash.
The kelp story is the kind of narrative we’re starved for: the possibility that we are responsible, capable and connected participants in an ecosystem.
Sonoquie also makes functional and wearable art, including earrings from kelp’s glistening dried strands. It’s completely biodegradable — even technically edible. Her art carries both her environmental ethics and the experience of collection: “I get to walk on the beach, in the sand and in the water and handling the seaweed. It’s all medicinal.”
The artistic practice itself is a feature of the Hold Fast exhibit in San Diego, too. Process films play on a loop on the walls. Aided by his wife and son, Hwang presses ink-slathered scales to get the imprint just right, while Poindexter wets cyanotype paper to illuminate the shapes of harvested giant kelp that lay for hours in the sun.
Without pulling the focus away from science or recovery efforts, these artists’ ecological creativity has its own role to play in crafting a more just relationship to our changing climate. Witnessing the beautiful things people have made for love of kelp ecosystems feels like potential energy. Long after hard facts fade from memory, the curiosity and care kindled by beauty remains.
Hold Fast is running at Birch Aquarium in San Diego through Sept. 2, 2024.
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This article appeared in the July 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The California artists illuminating kelp.”
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