The Sea From Whence We Came, Bronze, 34” x 16” x 14”, 2016
Photography by William Thuss
“Funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.”
I have recently completed a bronze portrait as part of the “How We Carry Forward” series titled “The Sea From Whence We Came”. This work will will be on display on the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory campus through September. The sculpture was made possible through a Hatchfund crowd-funding campaign and a Maine Arts Commission Project Grant.
‘How We Carry Forward’ is an art project inspired by my collaboration with Dr. James Coffman, Ph.D., at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory. Dr. Coffman is researching how chronic early life stress can predispose a person to more rapid aging later in life. We focused the collaboration on ‘how life continually brings the past into the present’. This theme occurs throughout Dr. Coffman’s research, from fetal chronic stress showing up decades later as early arthritis, and as in the understanding from evolution that we all come from the sea, as Dr. Coffman states: “ At a deeper level, much of what we are and do remains a legacy of our most ancient ancestors—we are literally an expression, in the words of Neil Shubin, of “our inner fish”.”