Nudi Spike

Photo Collage, Acrylic and Resin on Wood Panel | 12×12 inches | 1⅞" Deep | 2023 | Nudibranch Series

They look like they're flying.

Six aeolid nudibranchs — the most dramatic, most spike-adorned, most gloriously over-engineered members of an already extraordinary family — arranged against the deepest possible black in a composition that turns, slowly, like a solar system. Like a galaxy. Like six tiny dragons caught mid-flight in a beam of light from somewhere very far away.

The aeolid nudibranch is the nudibranch at its most extreme. Where other nudibranchs are smooth and rounded and jewel-like, the aeolid is all cerata — those extraordinary spike-like projections that cover the entire dorsal surface like a living crown of thorns, like fireworks frozen at the moment of maximum explosion, like nothing else that has ever existed on this planet or possibly any other. Each cerata is tipped with something that catches the light — white, electric blue, pale gold — so that in the resin, under the glass-like surface, each creature appears to be scattered with tiny stars. Six creatures. Hundreds of stars. One deep black universe to float them in.

The composition turns.

Top left, the most dramatic of the six — deep red and rust, its cerata dense and flame-like, its body arched in a curve of pure animal confidence. Top right, teal and orange, smaller and more delicate, its colour combination the most electric in the group. Centre, the ghost — cream and white and almost translucent, its cerata spreading outward like the petals of a flower made of light, the still point around which everything else revolves. Bottom left, a departure — a leafy green nudibranch, its texture more succulent than spike, a cool botanical note among all that animal drama. Bottom centre, the showstopper — blue tipped cerata blazing against rust and white, the most bioluminescent looking creature in a composition full of bioluminescent looking creatures, its blue so electric it seems to generate its own light source. Bottom right, rust and white, curling inward in a gesture of such elegant self-containment that it looks like a living comma — a pause, a breath, before the eye begins its orbit again.

And it does begin again. Because this is a composition with no beginning and no end — only the turning, only the orbit, only six extraordinary creatures floating in their private universe of deep black and resin light.

The high-gloss resin surface does here what it does throughout the Nudibranch series — it creates the illusion of depth, of water, of glass between the viewer and the creatures. You are not looking at a panel of wood and paper and paint. You are looking through something. Into something. The cerata tips catch the light through the resin the way bioluminescent creatures catch the light through ocean water — with that particular quality of illumination that seems to come from within rather than without.

Part of the Nudibranch series — a body of work born from the discovery that the ocean contains creatures so extraordinary, so visually impossible, so recklessly beautiful that to encounter them even in reproduction is to feel something shift permanently in your understanding of what nature is.

✦ Original, one-of-a-kind work ✦ Photo collage, acrylic and resin on wood panel ✦ 12 × 12 inches | 1⅞" deep ✦ Unframed — deep cradled panel, ready to hang ✦ 2023 ✦ Part of the Nudibranch series ✦ Free worldwide shipping ✦ $1,500

Six creatures. One universe. All of it, turning.