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Vancouver Island Marine Debris and Tohoku Tsunami Driftage
100 X 71 X 25 cm
Although the genesis of this piece began on March 11, 2011, it wasn’t until three years later, on March 11, 2014, while I was sorting through debris on a boat in the Broken Group Islands that it first came to me. I was working with 70 university student volunteers from Japan collecting tsunami driftage and marine debris from Pacific Rim National Park. One of the students found the containers together on a small stretch of rocky shoreline. He knew they were Japanese and that the blue one was used for vinegar. We contemplated these two pieces together for some time. Imagining their long journey across the ocean, washing ashore along this remote island in North America, found by a survivor of the tsunami and ending up in my boat. I knew then these objects embodied the essence of the documentary “Lost and Found”, and I vowed that I would incorporate them into a work for the filmmakers, John Choi and Nicolina Lanni. The work is really meant to tell many stories. My only hope is that it not be taken as morbid or disrespectful. For me, it represents the positive experiences that have come from the disaster, the serendipity of the objects and people coming together across the ocean, spun in the Gyre’s roulette, the ever-widening ripples from the tsunami continuing to affect those in it’s path.