Exhibition at T.F. Green Airport

If you’re going through T.F. Green Airport this holiday season, be sure to check out my art on display at the GREEN SPACE Gallery, part of an exhibition entitled ‘Fiber Optical’. You’ll see ‘Great Salt Cove Macroalgae #2 and #3 which are very large seaweed pulp paintings, and a series of framed works from my Herbarium series. You can see them from the Skywalk escalators on level 2, and in the gallery space at level 1 from the escalators to baggage claim.

The GREEN SPACE Gallery and Block Island Airport Gallery are a partnership between the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and the Rhode Island Airport Corporation, promoting outstanding work by artists living and working in Rhode Island. The galleries present art to an ever-changing audience of local, national and international travelers. Press Release >

On display through January 2020.

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Great Salt Cove Macroalgae

Great Salt Cove Macroalgae is inspired by research into red seaweed species found in Narragansett Bay, and Great Salt Cove, a body of briny water that once covered a portion of what is now downtown Providence. This group of handmade paper pulp paintings is based on Herbarium, my non-native seaweed pressings and maps of this historic waterway, and first displayed at the 2018 PVDFest. Pulp paintings are images made entirely of paper, by pigmenting pulps made from plants.

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Rhode Island Herbarium

Collected seaweeds and pondweeds are embedded in pulp during the wet hand papermaking process. This is an ongoing series of over 100 works that started in 2017 as an identification method while exploring displaced aquatic plant and algae species in Rhode Island waterways. Gilded metal leaf lettering on the larger 12” x 17” series indicates contemporary and Algonquin place names of where the species were collected.

This site specific and research based project touches on vital issues surrounding ecologies in the Narragansett Bay watershed, tying together aquatic environments with historical memory and contemplating the ongoing relationships between people and place.

Left to right:

  • Herbarium: Potowomut (Goddard) #3, artist-made paper from flax, abaca, seaweed, 12 x 17 in., gilded metal leaf, 2018

  • Herbarium: Namcook (Rome Point) #5 - Codium fragile (Dead Man’s Fingers), artist-made paper from flax, abaca, seaweed from Rome Point, gilded metal leaf,12 x 17 in. , 2018

  • Herbarium: Goddard #9, artist-made paper from flax, abaca, seaweed, gilded metal leaf, 12 x 17 in., 2019

  • Herbarium: Moonstone Beach #3, artist-made paper from flax, abaca, seaweed, gilded metal leaf, 12 x 17 in., 2019

  • Herbarium: Green Hill Beach #7, artist-made paper from flax, abaca, seaweed, gilded metal leaf, 12 x 17 in., 2019

public artMay Babcock