2016-2017
freshwater pearl, filament, aluminum
44”Dx128”Wx118”H
Spirit Cloud began as a meditation on memory and migration, but it is also a quiet statement on our changing climate. Composed of over 33,000 freshwater pearls suspended by thousands of transparent filaments, the work floats in space like a luminous breath, capturing a fleeting moment as though pressing pause on a dissolving sky.
Each pearl was once the response of a small, soft body to an injury. A piece of grit enters the shell; layer by layer, the mollusk wraps the irritation to protect itself. Over time, a wound becomes an object of beauty. In Spirit Cloud, this accumulated labour of healing is lifted into the space above our heads.
Today, the same mollusks live in rivers and seas under intense stress. Warming waters, pollution, and acidification are altering the chemistry that allows a shell, and therefore a pearl, to form at all. In this sense, pearls become a barometer for ocean health and a metaphor for healing through irritation. If the water becomes too hostile, the process that makes pearls possible breaks down. The cloud begins to thin.
Spirit Cloud is both offering and warning. It evokes ancestral cosmologies of mist, mountains, and spirit realms, while quietly pointing back to specific bodies of water and the fragile creatures that inhabit them. Viewers stand underneath and look up into a sky made from patient, repetitive gestures of survival. I hope they carry a double awareness out of the space: wonder at the shimmer, and a subtle unease about what it costs to produce it.
I think of this work as a place for slow climate empathy. There is no data and no slogan, only time, breath, and the knowledge that each point of light is a record of an irritation that was carefully wrapped and transformed. If a pearl holds the history of a wound, then Spirit Cloud asks how we might respond to the irritants of our own time, not by turning away, but by layering care, attention, and responsibility around the vulnerable waters we still depend on.