Artivist Series - Kirsten Carlson
multidimensional visual artist
Kirsten Carlson is a multidimensional ocean-inspired artist and visual science communicator who professes a love for nature and exploring the undersea world. She shares her art and writing on her Fathom It Studios website. Kirsten belongs to the Antarctic Artists and Writers Collective. She first visited Antarctica as a 24-year-old graduate student studying icebergs and how they affect the sea life community living on and in the sea bottom. Twenty-five years later Kirsten returned to Antarctica as a participant in the National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Program. Kirsten worked in the icy Antarctic waters below McMurdo Station making drawings.
Video conversation with Kirsten…click here
What Kirsten talks about…
“My passion is to inspire others about the beauty and wonder of nature. The only way I can do that is when I’m inspired.”
Kirsten grew up in Missouri. As a child she fell in love with the local neighborhood swimming pool. It wasn’t until she was a teenager that she put her toe in the Pacific Ocean. Her love for animals and water led her to study marine science in graduate school in Monterey, California. She got a job in a benthic laboratory which led to an offer to go to Antarctica. Kirsten said the experience changed her life.
Her first memories of diving in Antarctic was how clear the water is. She described it like being an astronaut in space. The other strong memory is her hands warming up from the numbing cold. Swimming under the sea ice is safe when it covers the surface. Kirsten says it’s nearly impossible to lose sight of the dive 4 ft. dive hole. “It glows like a full moon in the clear water.” There are also ropes and flashers. The hole is kept open by a heated up above the ice.
Drawing underwater required a bit of learning. Gloves are necessary for the cold water and that involved some practice to hold the woodless graphite drawing tool. She had a drawing slate with a light and camera attachment that acted as a portable desk. Kirsten prefers drawing to photography as it grounds her in the “present moment.” She finds the sketching is a more intimate engagement with the images she wants to capture.
Show Notes
Pam Ferris-Olson (00:00): I am pleased today to talk with Kirsten Carlson. I learned about Kirsten from Karen Romano Young. Karen was a featured guest on this podcast who, like Kirsten, belongs to the Antarctic Artist and Writers Collective. Kirsten first visited Antarctica as a 24-year-old graduate student studying icebergs and how they affect the sea life community living on and in the sea bottom.
Jane Rice (00:25): (Singing theme song)
Pam Ferris-Olson (00:25): 25 years later, Kirsten returned to Antarctica as a participant in the National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Program. Kirsten has worked in the icy Antarctica waters, making drawings. I'm looking forward to hearing more about her work and her experiences. I encourage everyone listening to the audio-only version of this podcast to make time view the video version of this podcast. Otherwise, you'll miss something amazing in terms of photographs and videos.
Pam Ferris-Olson (00:57): Welcome, Kirsten. I am really pleased to welcome you to the Women Mind the Water Artivist podcast. I'm interested to hear how your time at McMurdo station in Antarctica led you to shift your focus from marine research to science communication. You've written on your FATHOM IT STUDIOS website that since your first visit to Antarctica, you've become an artist, designer, photographer, illustrator, and writer. I'm particularly interested in hearing about drawing underwater. I've welcomed many artists who draw nature, but none have mentioned that they've done so while underwater. Kirsten, I'd like to dive in and ask you how you became interested in marine biology and how you ended up in Antarctica.
Kirsten Carlson (01:43): Okay. Well, first you have to know that I grew up in Missouri, and that makes this journey even more interesting, in my opinion. As a child, I fell in love with our local neighborhood swimming pool and became part fish. I swam competitively all through my youth and just loved the water. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I first put my toes in the Pacific Ocean.
Kirsten Carlson (02:13): Meanwhile, concurrently, I was interested in, I love animals, and I became interested in animal behavior when I was exposed to so science starting in like seventh grade, and so it's kind of a full circle that's happened to me. I do remember when I was a Girl Scout, they came and offered our group a chance to go to Antarctica, and I was not interested at all, so the interest in the Antarctic came much later. Excuse me, it came about when I was in graduate school. My love for the pool, i.e. water, my love for animals and understanding them and just enjoying their company led to my interest in marine science because I kind of combined water and animals.
Kirsten Carlson (03:03): Then when I was in school for university in Missouri, which has no large ocean nearby, I became very interested in going to graduate school to continue my education as a marine biologist, so I studied birds as an undergraduate, and then I moved to California to start working on my residency because tuition would be a lot cheaper, and I started talking to some of the Marine biologists and took a summer course, actually, at Hopkins Marine Station, which is located right next to Monterey Bay Aquarium, so it was a number of factors there that all came into play.
Kirsten Carlson (03:46): The first day I walked into the aquarium as a 20-year-old, I started crying because it was just this amazing place, and the first person I found was the head of the Volunteer Education Department. He told me that you could become a volunteer guide, which I eventually did. When I applied to graduate school at Moss Landing Marine lab and got in, I ended up trying to find work because I needed money to put myself through school, and the group that had the money was the Benthic Lab. The Benthic Lab studies invertebrates that live in and on the seafloor. You're going to start noticing the connecting dots.
Kirsten Carlson (04:30): The first project I got as a graduate student, other than sorting preserved invertebrates through a scope, was I was given a data set from the Arctic and that data set, I did so well organizing that data set and gave it back to the scientists in the group that they were like, "Do you want to go to Antarctica?", and I said, "Absolutely, I do," so just in my second year of school at Moss Landing, I went to Antarctica, and it changed my life. It was an epiphany.
Kirsten Carlson (05:03): I'd always known that whatever I did with my science career, I wanted to be a person who was an intermediary between the science and the public. That started when I started volunteering at the aquarium. I really enjoyed that aspect of connecting people. At the same time, I decided science wasn't going to actually fuel my creativity. I was, I couldn't find my path as a pure scientist. I knew at the time in the '90s, that if I wanted to be a scientist, I'd have to do research or education, and I didn't want to be a teacher, and I really didn't like writing research papers. I liked writing creatively. That's kind of how it all started with the marine science.
Pam Ferris-Olson (05:51): I got to say, you're blowing my mind. First of all, growing up in Missouri and having a Girl Scout troop offer you the chance to go to Antarctica. How cool is that? I mean, when I think of Girl Scouts, I think of thin mints, I don't think of trips to Antarctica. Then I have to say, I can remember going to Monterey and the aquarium and I can understand your tears because I was about to see same age and I was hooked, too.
Pam Ferris-Olson (06:21): When you were asked to go to Antarctica, did you have any idea what you were getting into? My graduate work was with studying beavers in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Northern California and one of my strongest memories is being cold. The snowmelt water where the beavers live is particularly cold at night, or at least I thought it was, so I was never immersed totally in water, whereas you were underwater. What are your strongest memories of your earliest experiences underwater in Antarctica?
Kirsten Carlson (07:00): As far as my first memories of Antarctica, I had dove in the Arctic. I had been certified in when I was 17 at University of Missouri to scuba dive. Up to that point, I had dove a lake and I had dove in Monterey Bay water, which is about 55 degrees, and then when I went to the Arctic, I was in the Canadian Arctic, and all that diving, you can say for sure across the board that all that diving was kind of murky. Visibility is limited in any of those places to 30 feet, or on a lucky day, maybe 40, but most of the time, 10 feet, and there were dives where I couldn't even see my hand in front of my face.
Kirsten Carlson (07:51): Antarctica, aside from preparing to dive in a dry suit, which I had done to go to the Arctic, the first dive I did underwater, it was like I was an astronaut in space. Because the water was so clear, there was no limit to how far I could see except where the light ended, so that was one of the strongest visual memories I had.
Kirsten Carlson (08:19): The other one is the sense in my hands. As a 24-year-old, I was given wet gloves, which means water could circulate through them. We'd pour almost boiling, as hot as we could stand water inside our gloves, seal them, we'd start our dive, and within 10 minutes that water would be ambient mature, or probably less, I never timed it, and then your hands would start going numb. Instructions were when you could no longer function with your hands, you needed to come back up because that was a safety issue. You can still function with numb hands, so every time I would come up from the dive, my hands would be numb, and the sensation of numb hands coming back to life is like pins and needles hitting your funny bone over and over and over on your elbow. It was extremely painful. It happened twice when I was there in 2017 because of some faulty glove stuff, but I was wearing dry gloves then, but those are my two strongest memories, the clarity of the water, and the freezing cold hands.
Pam Ferris-Olson (09:28): When you're underwater in Antarctica, what do you hear, and what do you see?
Kirsten Carlson (09:33): What you hear are your bubbles. That's true for any scuba diving that you do on regular tanks and regulators. I, unfortunately, have never had the opportunity to do rebreather diving, which is very quiet comparatively, so the bubbles are a constant, I call it a watery Darth Vader sound.
Kirsten Carlson (09:54): Then what you see is the first thing that I always notice when I come down through the hole is I'm always looking at the under-ice surface, because I want to look at the color. It's a beautiful translucent blue. As a season progresses, it becomes more golden and brown because there's plankton diatoms growing on the under-ice surface and they are golden brown. The light is shining 24/7 in Antarctica, and as you enter the underwater world, it becomes sort of a twilight-filtered effect because of the light coming through the six or seven feet of ice.
Kirsten Carlson (10:34): Then as you descend to the seafloor, often you'll see creatures floating by in the water column, jellies. Up at the under-ice surface, you'll usually see very small fish. If you keep your eyes open, you'll see them moving around. Then as you descend to the seafloor, the terrain will dictate what you see. If it's a rocky bottom, you're going to see things crawling around. If it's a soft bottom, you can see clam siphons sticking out of the soft sediments. The fish are ever-present. The sea stars are everywhere. Then every once in a while, if you're lucky, a seal will swim by, and you always hear the sound, the vocalization of Weddell seals, which is otherworldly, and one of the most fascinating sounds I've ever heard.
Pam Ferris-Olson (11:29): Okay, so you were there to study icebergs on the seafloor. How does one go about studying icebergs underwater?
Kirsten Carlson (11:39): In 1992, I went to the Arctic and to the Antarctic with the specific project of looking at what icebergs did when they hit the seafloor and how they affected the sea life on the seafloor, where these icebergs would plow. Imagine a slow-moving tornado, or a bulldozer, depending on your visuals. When it hits bottom, those creatures that can move, like fish kind of move quickly, they can get out of the way, but there are animals like clams that don't really move a whole lot, so if they're in the path, they can't really leave, so they unfortunately meet their demise. But just like on land, scientists have noticed that there is a recovery that happens. After an iceberg moves through and scours the bottom, a series of communities come back. Obviously, the things that move can come in first, and they will actually prey on the things that might have died, and eventually, as a scour ages and gets older, you can track. The idea was to figure out if you could age and age a scour by the community that was there, so you have an unscoured area and a scoured area.
Pam Ferris-Olson (13:01): I read this incredible book by a Canadian cave diver, Jill Heinerth, and her book, Into the Planet, is Jill's experience is diving inside the iceberg caves. It was a dangerous proposition because ice is always moving and changing shape. When you were studying the icebergs, did you ever feel like you were in danger?
Kirsten Carlson (13:26): I would never do what she did. It's actually really pretty safe to dive in Antarctica when the sea ice is covering the ocean because that dive hole that's four feet in diameter that you go through, combined with the clarity of the water, when we're diving there, makes it absolutely impossible, unless you're blind, to lose sight of that hole because it glows like a full moon.
Kirsten Carlson (14:01): Now, when you get up into the shallows of Antarctica, and the sea ice is really close by, you may lose sight of the hole, but that's why we always have a rope and a flag and these little flashers going off so we can always see it in the distance. Again, the clarity of the water is ideal for that. We could not do that kind of diving anywhere else in the world, basically.
Pam Ferris-Olson (14:25): How are they keeping the hole open?
Kirsten Carlson (14:29): In Antarctica, with the dive hole, there's always a hut over the hole. It's a little heated room. It has a heater. It's a very comfortable place to sit between dives when you're doing your surface interval. They also have rigged a little system so that a fan blows warm air down on top of the hole because we turn the heat down when we leave and crank it up when we get back in, but that's how the hole stays open.
Pam Ferris-Olson (15:02): All right, so on your website, you mentioned that you faced many challenges while you were in Antarctica. What were some of these challenges?
Kirsten Carlson (15:13): Well, I'll highlight three for you. I love to nest them in between the successes as well. The three challenges that came into play are drawing in Antarctica underwater is slightly different than drawing underwater in Fiji, which is the place I started drawing underwater in 2006, and so I ran into some challenges that I could only figure out once I got there around coordination with my glove and my pencil. Now, in tropical waters, I typically don't wear gloves, or at least I don't wear a glove on my drawing hand. Sometimes I'll wear a glove on my non-drawing hand. I'm left-handed.
Kirsten Carlson (16:01): I haven't explained this yet, but I'm wearing a dry suit, so air is the thing, a thin layer of air is keeping you warm. It moves to the highest point on your body, so if you're horizontal, and your hands are below your body, all the air is not in your hands, and that means your hands get cold really fast, so about every 30 seconds or so, I'd raise my hands when I was drawing, so that warm air would come up into my hands, and then I'd go back to drawing.
Kirsten Carlson (16:32): When I first started diving in 2017, to try to figure out how to combine drawing and photography, I would go ahead and draw until my hands were cold, and then I would switch to the camera, because the camera, you're like this, and your hands are up. Then we got smarter with the help of the dive officers down there, excuse me, Rob and Steve. They made my drawing slate, which I actually have. This is how big it is. Hopefully you can see that.
Pam Ferris-Olson (17:01): Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kirsten Carlson (17:02): They made my drawing slate into a drawing platform, so we attached a light and a camera so that the camera would film what I was drawing as I was drawing it, so I no longer had to take the camera separately from my drawing slate, so that was awesome. That was the success. The light really helped because it's sort of twilight underneath the sea ice. I was finding it a little too dark and I was getting to be near 50 years old, so that was causing some issues. It felt like I had a little traveling desk with me. It was dynamite.
Pam Ferris-Olson (17:36): But Kirsten, why draw underwater as opposed to taking your pictures, or photographs, and then drawing from them, or just sticking with the photographs?
Kirsten Carlson (17:47): Yeah. It's the same reason that I choose to sketch above water, actually. It's to bring me into the present moment. There are things you experience when you're drawing them that don't happen if you're just photographing them. There's things you notice about shapes, about textures, about colors. It slows me down when I'm sketching, whereas with photography, I feel like I'm always hurrying to get the next shot, or trying to get the perfect shot. I'm doing a lot of internal analyzing, whereas with drawing and sketching, whether it be above water, or below water, I'm observing and capturing my creativity and my creative mind has time to think and absorb and ask questions. It's just, I love field sketching. I've been doing it for so many years now. It really helped me while I was in Antarctica see things and record things and also come away with ideas that I never would've gotten if I had just gone down there with a camera.
Pam Ferris-Olson (19:02): That's a great analysis and description and I get it. You showed us what you draw on. What you draw with?
Kirsten Carlson (19:13): I keep it really simple underwater. This is the pencil case. We just moved, so the pencil is not in here right now, but I use a graphite pencil that's woodless, so it has no wood. When you use wood underwater, it gets water-logged, and it just doesn't do well. Right inside here, it's a perfect size for a pencil that's called a woodless pencil. It's all graphite. I use plastic paper. I used to use Rite in the Rain paper when I was in graduate school to record data.
Kirsten Carlson (19:53): This is where it all evolved from is as a Marine biologist, I had to record data underwater, and I was using a slate, I was using a pencil, and I was using underwater paper, and so it was a natural evolution for me, as I brought my science and art together, to bring this tool that I use as a scientist into my art world and the paper that I now is a modern invention. It's a polypropylene it's made by a company called YPO and many artists are using it for above water drawings, but I limit it to a pencil underwater because it's simple, I can take color notes, and I'm kind of imitating the explorers of Antarctica from 100-plus years ago.
Pam Ferris-Olson (20:35): Nice. Is there a particular message that you're trying to convey when you draw underwater?
Kirsten Carlson (20:41): I'm only interested in chasing and finding and exploring and being aware of those things that inspire me because my passion is to inspire others about the beauty and wonder of nature, and the only way that I can do that is when I'm inspired by the beauty and wonder of nature, so when I'm inspired, then it will carry through my work.
Pam Ferris-Olson (21:05): What sort of challenges are facing Antarctica and specifically the waters around Antarctica?
Kirsten Carlson (21:12): When I was in Antarctica in 2017, I did talk to the people that had been going down for many years about any changes they had seen. Antarctica underwater is an extremely stable environment. The water temperature doesn't vary a whole lot. The biggest concern among scientists is that as the temperature changes, so will the pH of the water, and that doesn't sound like a very important thing, but when you think about of the creatures that live underwater, a lot of them use calcium because they have shells, so there is a lot of concern about what will happen to the sea life communities as the water warms, which is happening more rapidly on what's called the Palmer Peninsula, which extends up below South America, whereas I was diving in McMurdo, which is sort of due south of New Zealand. I think it's a slightly more stable environment, but as I said, people that have been diving there have noticed changes, specifically the clarity of the water.
Pam Ferris-Olson (22:27): What can listeners do to make positive difference for Antarctica waters and the creatures that live in them?
Kirsten Carlson (22:34): Help in what ways you think can help the planet. That might be going out and picking up litter. There's a saying that all litter eventually ends up in the ocean, even if you're in Missouri, for example, so doing something as simple as that. Even though it's highly unlikely a penguin in Antarctica would ever come across the piece of litter that you picked up on your street, there are effects that you can have like that really help the planet as a whole, so think globally. Think about in terms of how you can impact by doing things locally and it will have a trickle-down effect in a place as far away as Antarctica.
Pam Ferris-Olson (23:17): Okay. Well, thank you, Kirsten, for being on the Women Mind the Water Podcast. I hope listeners will agree that this was a fascinating look at a world many of us know little about. I hope they will want to know more. I am grateful for your sense of adventure and inquisitive nature and for your artistic practice that has immersed us all in a world we might not otherwise have known.
Jane Rice (23:42): (Singing theme song)
Pam Ferris-Olson (23:42): I'd like to remind listeners that I've been speaking Kirsten Carlson for the Women Mind the Water Podcast series. This series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com. An audio-only version of this podcast is available on the Women Mind the Water website, on iTunes, and other sites. Women Mind the Water is grateful to Jane Rice for this use of her song, Women of Water. All rights for the Women Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson.