2026
Medium: Reclaimed nylon crab trap rope, marine trash including ghost fishing gear
Dimensions: 10″x10″x44″
Price / Status: $ 1850 USD — Available for sale
Exhibition History: Wesley Chapel Library Gallery Opening
Themes: Habitat destruction, ecological destruction, over fishing, human nature relationship
Artist statement:
The Water Keepers is accumulated evidence of failure.
The vessel form is among the oldest human technologies for holding, containing, preserving — but here constructed from rope that once held crab traps, built from the infrastructure of extraction itself. It ruptures downward, trailing strands threaded with ghost net: fishing apparatus that outlasts its purpose by decades, continuing to catch and kill passively long after abandonment. The vessel that was meant to hold cannot hold. Those who keep versus those kept. The water keeps its dead. The traps kept their catch. The keepers of the water have failed.
The materials perform ecological testimony. The rope carries the physical memory of labor and extraction from the Gulf. The ghost net and marine debris recovered from a beach adjacent to the Courtney Campbell Causeway marine research station become damning evidence — non-biodegradable materials fused by time and tide into the mangrove root systems, indistinguishable at first from the natural world around them. The shells caught within the debris are not decorative. They are remains of life that did not escape the apparatus, preserved inside the work’s own body.
The title holds without resolution: stewardship and its failure, the irony of what keeps and what is kept, the bitterness of what we were supposed to be. We are all the water keepers. All the water. All the destruction that can no longer be contained.