FATHOM

There are places along Vancouver Island’s coastline that don’t appear on tourist maps. Tidal passages that locals navigate by instinct. Inlets that dead-end into silence. Island groups that surface and submerge with the tide. Fathom is named for the nautical unit of depth — and for the act of trying to understand something that resists full comprehension.

Each shell in this collection was poured with pearl iridescent resin, a material decision that came from a single question: what does light look like when it travels through sixty feet of water? The answer is this — not darkness, but a luminosity that has no direct source. These are not shells painted to look like the sea. They are the sea, rendered in the only material that behaves like water held still.

This collection holds both flat shells and vessel forms — pieces that open upward, that hold space rather than occupy it. Two pieces mark a threshold, where the light stopped sitting on the surface and began living inside it.

Salish Shift