Artivist Series - Rebecca Rutstein
multidisciplinary artist and ocean explorer
Rebecca Rutstein is an accomplished artist who has received many awards and been involved in numerous public exhibitions. Rebecca’s career has taken her to remarkable places including the high seas and the ocean floor. In all, her artwork strives to build connections with nature, inspire wonder, and foster environmental stewardship.
She is the recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, has had her collaborations funded by the National Science Foundation and numerous international exhibitions including an immersive video installation currently on view at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C. Rebecca has participated in seven expeditions at sea including two to the bottom of the ocean. Rebecca’s artwork strives to build connections with nature, inspire wonder, and foster environmental stewardship. Today, we will focus on her Artist at Sea series. Her latest artist at sea residency, her seventh, was aboard the University of Hawaii’s Research /Vessel Kilo Moana. The work created from that residency is to be exhibited this year at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Oregon State University and James Madison University in Virginia.
Video conversation with Rebecca … click here
What Rebecca talks about …
Her artistic journey grew out of an introductory geology course for art majors during her undergraduate studies at Cornell University. In this class she took field trips to state parks to see the exposed geology. It planted a seed for later works of art. About a decade later, she began to think of incorporating the idea of geologic forces causing upheaval as a metaphor for human relations. Then she began a genuine pursuit of working to know more about geology and learn more about geology in different parts of the world. She was involved in a variety of artistic residencies. In one she studied a map of the ocean floor, a map of the ocean floor made from sound waves. Rebecca was fascinated by the landscape and used it as a springboard for her future artistic studies.
Her personal challenge is to express the science without being didactic. She wants the viewer to have a visceral experience. It’s also really challenging to work on a boat which is constantly in motion. Before a trip, I have to anticipate what to bring as it’s not like there’s an art supply store down the street. This means she has to anticipate what she might want to use. Another challenge is the motion of the ship. It can be very intense at times. Her first expedition was during a hurricane. The pitch and roll of the ship was quite drastic. What drew ger back to the second residency was that she’d fallen in love with the ocean – the solitude, the peacefulness of it - combined with the exuberance of working with scientists and exploring. We were uncovering new terrain. All the residencies has been amazing but the two that were most impactful for her were the two she went down on Alvin, the deep sea submersible: once off the coast of Costa Rica, the other off the coast of Mexico in the Gulf of California. It was the most incredible experience in her lifetime as it framed her place in the world and impacted her creatively as an artist. Any fear she might have had in traveling more than 1.5 miles below the ocean surface was overridden by the opportunity. She was inside a 6-ft. titanium spear with two other people – a pilot and another passenger. It took 1 ½ hours to descend. The sense of scale is hard to describe. She was in an area off of Mexico where there were vents of superheated water and unusual life. Her art work rather than describing the landscape focuses on the microbes that exist there and the networks they create. Rebecca discusses a permanent exhibit at Georgia Museum of Art that grew out of her experience in Alvin. It’s a 64-ft. installation that relates to the bio- luminescent light of the microbes.
What concerns her about the state of the ocean is all the plastic she’s seen. Even more than a mile down she’s seen plastic bottles. She’s also seen damaged coral. There’s much to be concerned about as every ecosystem has been negatively affected by human activity. But Rebecca also has hope as she believes that the ocean is a resilient ecosystem. The microbes seem able to adjust and adapt. She also believes that humans can adapt too as there is an interest in bringing people together. “There is an energy to bring different voices together to solve different issues and challenges.”
Show Notes
00:00:01 Pamela Ferris-Olson Today on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series on womenmindthewater.com the speaking with Rebecca Rutstein, an accomplished artist who has received many awards and been involved in numerous public exhibitions. Rebecca's career has taken her to remarkable places including the high seas and the ocean floor.
Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast and womenmindthewater.com engages artists in conversation about their work and explores her connection with the water. Through their stories Wo(men) Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect the ocean and her creatures.
Today, I'm speaking with Rebecca Rutstein. Wo(men) Mind the Water is pleased to have Rebecca Rutstein to talk about her art and her efforts to share scientific discoveries gathered on and below the ocean. She is the recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the arts and has had her collaborations funded by the National Science Foundation and numerous international exhibitions, including an immersive video installation, currently on view at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. Rebecca has participated in seven Expeditions at Sea including two to the bottom of the ocean. Rebecca's artwork strives to build connections with nature, inspire wonder, and foster environmental stewardship. Today, we will focus on her Artist at Sea series. Her latest Artist at Sea residency, her 7th, was aboard the University of Hawaii's Research Vessel Hilo Moana. The work created from that residency is to be exhibited this year at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Oregon State University and James Madison University in Virginia.
Welcome, Rebecca. I'm extremely grateful to Karen Romano Young, a previous guest on the Wo(man) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast who suggested you as a guest. You two were aboard the same vessel during one Artist at Sea residency.
00:02:09 Let's talk about how you came to be part of that residency and how you reframe research into your art. I'd like to start by asking how someone with a BFA in painting from Cornell and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, both universities located inland, developed sea legs for working at sea.
00:02:33 Rebecca Rutstein It's such a great question and but first I just wanted to say thank you for having me. It's you have a wonderful roster of artists and I'm really happy to be part.
That again, it's a great question and I think that it all really started from a class that I took at Cornell on geology. It was an intro geology class, it was for non-science majors. I was an art major and we would go on field trips to state parks and see the sort of exposed geology that was that was happening and learned first-hand the kind of forces underneath the surface that were causing this and these sort of, you know, plate tectonic processes and geologic processes. And so I became fascinated in this subject, and it wasn't something that I really wove into my artistic practice for many years, but it sort of planted the seed. I eventually, after Graduate School, and it was probably about 10 years after I had taken that geology class I started thinking about incorporating this idea of these forces causing upheaval. It was really at first a metaphor really for interpersonal relationships I was experiencing in my 20s; thinking about how forces underneath kind of shape outcomes and then it became like a real kind of genuine pursuit.
00:04:04 Rebecca Rutstein And thinking about and wanting to learn about geology in different areas of the world. And so I started going on residencies, artistic residencies. I would apply for different programs to learn about the geology and to create painting narratives about them. And I found myself in Canada exploring the Canadian Rockies, and then I ended up in Hawaii doing a residency exploring the Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii. Trying to understand the processes that form the Hawaiian Islands. And just to be quick here it was there that I discovered a map of the ocean floor. A multi-beam sonar map, which is essentially a map that is imaged through sound waves. Pings of sound are sent down to the bottom of the ocean, and the time that it takes to return back up to the surface to the ship is measured. So you can create these sort of profiles of the ocean floor topography. And so I was just fascinated by this map and fascinated by this hidden landscape. And all of a sudden I realized that I was only looking at the tip of the iceberg when I was looking at the islands themselves. I wanted to go down there. I wanted to go see this, this hidden landscape at the bottom of the ocean. And that was sort of the springboard for my whole endeavor into kind of wanting to learn about the deep ocean.
00:05:31 Pamela Ferris-Olson So what sort of challenges do you encounter when you try and translate the work of scientists into your artwork?
00:05:37 Rebecca Rutstein For me, my personal challenge is to sort be able to communicate science without my work being didactic. You know, I want my work to have a visceral experience for the viewer.
00:05:51 Pamela Ferris-Olson OK, so I imagine it's tricky to work in a studio on board a boat which is always in motion. What issues do you have to overcome in order to work in a studio aboard a boat?
00:06:04 Rebecca Rutstein It's a great question and it is really challenging. I will say each time I've been at sea, I've had a different kind of setup. You know, sometimes I've had as little as maybe a foot and a half of tabletop space and I have a scientist right next to me on a very small ship, that happened on the Salish Sea. Other times I've had actually a whole lab to myself where I can spread out. But I think the two biggest challenges are: one anticipating what I need to bring with me because it's not like there's an art supply down the street. You know? So whatever I bring with me or whatever I ship ahead of time is what I have to work with. And so, I really need to anticipate what I might want to use and what materials I'll need. The other main challenge that I've experienced is the motion of the ship. The motion of the ship can be very intense at times. In fact, my very first expedition at sea, I was actually sailing from the Galapagos Islands to San Diego on a three-week journey.
00:07:12 Rebecca Rutstein And we were actually trailing a hurricane off the coast of Mexico. It was in the East Pacific Ocean. And so we were confronted with a lot of motion. The heave, pitch, and roll of the ship was really quite drastic. And we in fact had to slow down cause the hurricane itself was slow moving. So when we were going at 9 or 10 knots, we were gonna into this hurricane. So we had to actually kind of switch gears and turn off our engines for two days and run off jet pumps.
Just so that we were only traveling about two to three knots in order not to kind of smack into this hurricane. But in the meantime, you can imagine there was a lot of motion on the ship and it actually changed the trajectory of my practice and what I was doing because I at first was trying to create these very kind of lineated kind of tightly painted paintings thinking about mapping data and trying to translate this sort of deep ocean terrain. And what I realized was in the moment I had to kind of embrace the reality of the situation. And so I actually started pouring the paint onto the canvas. When I poured the paint on the canvas, the kind of patterns that are created are actually mimicking other patterns that you can find in nature. So for instance, they look like strata of rock.
00:08:40 Rebecca Rutstein They look like rock layers. They look like stromatolite fossils. They look like ocean eddies and waves. And so, I love that sort of play in his sort of poured paint. They would become a backdrop for these other types of overlays of mapping data. But experience of being on the ship and with the motion was an incredible challenge to overcome. But really kind of had this wonderful kind of result in kind of shifting what I was doing that I continued to do in my work.
00:09:17 Pamela Ferris-Olson If your first experience is trailing a hurricane, what drew you back to a second residency at sea?
00:09:26 Rebecca Rutstein That's funny. That's a good question. It's interesting. You know, I had never really sailed on the ship, you know. You know other than some small. It had never been on a research vessel and miraculously, I really had my sea legs from day one. I never got sick even through this sort of close counter with the hurricane. I feel in love with being out on the open ocean. It was the combination of just the solitude of it, even though I was with, you know, a large group of people on the ship. There was just this peacefulness of being out on the open ocean. That, coupled with the excitement of working with scientists and exploring and learning and discovering. You know, we were uncovering new terrain that we were mapping as we were passing along the ocean floor. Most of the world's ocean has not been mapped in high resolution. We've sort of in a period now where scientists are actively trying to map as much as they can by 2030. But we're still only about 10% there. And so it was so exciting to be uncovering this new terrain on our computer screens through sound waves. And then I was sort of incorporating that data into my work.
00:10:49 Pamela Ferris-Olson So of the seven Residencies at Sea you participated in, which has had the greatest impact on you?
00:10:58 Rebecca Rutstein So that's a great question and I would have to say that while all of the Residencies at Sea have been, you know, amazing in different ways, my two favorite and the ones that were the most impactful were the ones where I went down in Alvin, the deep sea submersible. Those two expeditions were back-to-back in the fall of 2018. One was diving down off the coast of Costa Rica and the other one was off the coast of Mexico in the Gulf of California. The experience of going down in Alvin is just, you know an unparalleled experience. It is, you know, by far, the most incredible experience
I've ever had, in my lifetime. I can't stress enough just what its impact had on me not only just as a human being and just understanding my sense of place in the world, but how small we are. But just how it affected me creatively as an artist and how inspiring it was. So it just was really a truly spiritual and metaphysical experience.
00:12:13 Pamela Ferris-Olson So going down and Alvin is akin to going to the moon. Very few people have done it. I don't know how far down you went. Alvin, goes down miles and it's not very big. For me, if I knew I was gonna have a chance to go, I would both be elated and scared. How do you prepare for the idea that you're in this cramped space several miles below the ocean and then seeing things that are really bizarre but no one else has seen?
00:12:44 Rebecca Rutstein The opportunity to do something that, as you mentioned, so few people have had the opportunity to do really supersedes any type of fear that I have. I am a little bit claustrophobic. ut I definitely had a fear of being in closed spaces and I also have a fear of heights. But I will tell you that any fear that I have of being in an enclosed space was overridden by this just incredible opportunity. So yeah, you're in a six foot sphere, a titanium sphere. You can barely stand up in it and there's, you know, there's two passengers and a pilot. The experience of descending the water column is really again the most incredible experience because you really get the sense of how deep the ocean is. You know, I went down 2200 meters.
00:13:41 Rebecca Rutstein Because we are descending without any motors, you know, we are descending just kind of free falling for an hour and a half before we hit the bottom. The sense of scale is hard to describe and it's impossible to understand when you're just looking at video footage, you know, or watching Blue Planet. You can't. You don't get a sense of how far down that actually is. Some of the things that I saw, you know. We were in off the coast of Mexico, we were exploring a really interesting system of hydrothermal vents. It's where two tectonic plates are separating. And you have super-heated ocean water that gets sucked down into this opening and heated back up and expelled. You also have chemicals that are spewing out of this opening in the ocean floor, this fissure. And you also have these mineral deposits of chimneys that are emitting, you know, all these chemicals. This particular location was really incredible because it's where two land masses are really close together. You have Baja California and the coast of Mexico that are very close together. These two land masses. It's a nascent sea in between the Gulf of California with this, you know, opening as I described. But these two landmasses are dropping down sediment onto the vents. So it's creating this situation where (they're called sedimented vents) you have kind of tributaries dropping down sediment on top of this super-heated water and chemicals. Essentially causing oil to form very quickly because of all this heat and pressure. And so it's a really unique location. One of the only places in the world where this is happening and you have again these really interesting chimneys and hydrothermal vents and all of the chemosynthetic life that subsist on chemicals that are coming out of the ocean floor. And so what's really the most incredible part is learning and seeing first-hand these systems that are really analog for life on other planets and for origins of life.
00:15:52 Pamela Ferris-Olson Right.
00:15:58 Rebecca Rutstein Where you know, where we came from.
00:16:00 Pamela Ferris-Olson So how did you translate that into your artwork?
00:16:04 Rebecca Rutstein Well, I'm really interested in sort of looking my work as pretty abstract. And so, I'm not necessarily painting exactly what I see and trying to replicate that landscape that sort of really bizarre landscape. I'm really interested in trying to understand the systems and the processes and these networks that are kind of hidden from view.
And so when I say hidden from view, I mean, not only the landscape itself and working with mapping data to uncover that in my paintings. But also thinking about on a microscopic level what's hidden from view. And so I've worked with a lot of microbiologists looking at microbes on a microscopic level on understanding the kind of networks that they create and how they are creating structures that maximize their own existence and growth through allowing the flow of oxygen and chemicals and creating these sort of open structures.
00:17:09 Rebecca Rutstein I'll just quickly speak about the interactive installation. This is a permanent installation at the Georgia Museum of Art where I collaborated with Mandy Joy, who is a microbiologist and who I went down in Alvin with off the coast of Mexico to this place that I'm describing. Essentially, I took my experience going down on Alvin and seeing as I was descending the water column. Seeing in the darkness all this bioluminescent life, and translated that into a piece that is a 64 foot long sculptural installation. The sculptures themselves are these sort of abstracted hexagonal forms that are inspired by hydrocarbon structures that form the oil I mentioned that's forming in this location at the bottom of the ocean. These sculptures are backlit with LED lights that are triggered by motion sensors on either end of this very long piece. And so when you walk by the piece or when you approach the piece, it triggers this disturbance in the piece that sets off trails of light that go down the piece. And these trails of light are mimicking one of the organisms that are really prolific in this area in Guaymas Basin, called siphonophore. Siphonophores are pretty common. They are related to a jellyfish and they have these sort of long tentacles. They react to a predator by sending trails of light down all its tentacles to confuse the predator.
00:18:46 Pamela Ferris-Olson Well, I can see that a 64 foot installation is going to seem large to people and it's a great metaphor for how deep the ocean is. I love that.
I typically end a podcast by asking my guests to issue a call for action. I'd like to ask you this question in two parts. The first part I'd like to know what you've learned in your 7 journeys on Residencies at Sea vessels that concerns you most about the state of the ocean.
00:19:18 Rebecca Rutstein You know one of the trips that I went on the one in Mexico. In addition to this incredible ecosystem of life that are surviving on chemicals, we did observe plastics at the very bottom. We're talking over a mile deep in the very deep sea, plastic bottles. And we also saw some damaged corals. Two of my collaborators are very invested and working in the Gulf of Mexico to study the degradation of corals over the past 12 or 13 years, since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And so I'm actually working on a project now that is part of a restoration effort to kind of help, rehabilitate these corals in the deep part of the Gulf of Mexico.
00:20:22 Rebecca Rutstein You know, there are so many things to be concerned about in terms of ocean acidification in terms of ocean warming. Everything is connected and every ecosystem in the ocean is affected by these changes and these sort of human caused impacts.
00:20:42 Pamela Ferris-Olson Well, that is a definitely a bleak side to it, but in order to go forward, we have to some sort of hope. So what did you learned aboard the vessels that gives you some hope for the future?
00:20:58 Rebecca Rutstein I am very hopeful. I think my hope is sort of twofold. I think the ocean is a resilient system and I've learned so much about microbial growth and microbial networks, and how resilient microbes are, and how microbes can really kind of respond to perturbations and react and adjust, and almost correct in a lot of ways. Some of the damage that we cause. The other part of it though has not necessarily to do with the ocean itself but with humanity. My being out in the ocean and my having the opportunity to go on research vessels is a response to an interest in bringing people together to learn and to grow together. And so, for instance, all of my residencies have been supported by the National Science Foundation that are interested in broader impacts of scientific research. They're interested in having people come to help communicate that science. And so for me, as an artist that's often working with scientists and collaborating. I really get the sense that there is a real spark right now. There's an energy in bringing different voices together to solve global issues and challenges. And so, the National Academy of Sciences has the Keck Futures Initiative which is something that supported a project that I'm part of called the Ocean Memory Project. And the ocean memory practice is about bringing voices together, bringing artists and people and humanities, together with scientists to think about the ocean and to think in different ways about how to solve these sort of global challenges. And I think that's this the path forward. People working together instead of being in their silos. People coming together to think about these issues and come up with solutions and so I'm really hopeful because I think that there's a real kind of collective push towards this and I'm excited to be part of it.
00:23:15 Pamela Ferris-Olson Well, I think we agree on all those points and that's what I'm trying to do with this podcast. So, Rebecca, I'm extremely grateful you agreed to be on the Wo(men) in the Water Artivist Series. I expect listeners will have found our conversation about your work at sea extremely interesting.
I'd like to remind listeners that I've been speaking with Rebecca Rutstein. Her work is situated at the intersection of art, science and technology and inspired by her experiences with the natural world. Our conversation today focused on her experiences as an artist aboard Expeditions at Sea.
Rebecca Rutstein is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. The series can be viewed on womenlindawater.com, Museum on Main Street, and YouTube. An audio-only version of this podcast is available on womenmindthewater.com, on iTunes, and Spotify. Wo(men) Mind the Water is grateful to Jaine Rice for the use of her song Women of Water. All rights for the Wo(men) Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson.