Larval Lobster Contemplates Fossil Fuels

Materials:
Box: cherry wood, glass panel - sandblasted, oil pastel, lacquer.
1000 mil Lab glass: diamond drill engraved, lapis lazuli, gold lacquer.
Four Small Specimen jars: diamond drill engraved, gold lacquer and crude oil.

With every ocean oil spill we are confronted with images of pelicans, seals, dolphins and fish covered in crude oil, and our hearts break. In 2010, a few weeks before the BP Oil Spill, I was volunteering on a NOAA scientific cruise during an annual fisheries investigation in the Pacific Ocean. We were several hundred miles offshore, when I looked through a microscope and saw the brilliant blue eyes of a larval lobster looking back at me. What an amazing creature this was - only a few millimeters in size, a gossamer transparent body with extending long feathery appendages covered with setae. A few weeks later, as news of the BP oil spill disaster struck, I often thought of that exquisite blue-eyed larval lobster and felt my heart break thinking of how many zooplankton also get caught in currents of crude oil. In 2015, yet another destructive oil spill occurred in the Pacific Ocean near Santa Barbara. I offer this piece as a memorial to all the life forms we have lost to our love affair with fossil fuel.