Notice What You Worship is the temporal body of work created during the Fulbright Wallace residency at Headlands Centre for the Arts in San Francisco. Rebecca wanted the residency to sit lightly on the planet. Part of this was offsetting the CO2 emission from her return flight by making 16 tones of compost. She only worked with found materials and at the completion of this exhibition the seaweed works will be retuned to the sea to continue their life cycle.
“Climate change allows us to experience how all life is interconnected as we all share the same home. I see that as an opportunity to figure out how we respond and adapt to these circumstances and the residency allowed me to experiment with new ways of being an artist that are regenerative and to explore different models of exchange.”
Rebecca experimented with bullkelp, the local seaweed variety that gets washed ashore on Rodeo beach. In Haida (Skidegate dialect), it is called ‘Ihqyaama’ , in Greek it is called Nereocystis luetkeana (mermaids bladder). The kelp forests have declined by 90% in the last 10 years due to environmental factors including sea temperature rising.
http://farallones.org/kelp/ A group dedicated to saving the kelp forests.