On the passage between Bali and Lombok, I began to understand the sea differently, and my own journey through time.
Last summer, somewhere between Bali and Lombok, I was humbled by the sea. As we pulled away from Bali, the last figure on the horizon was Garuda Wisnu Kencana the enormous monument of the Hindu god Vishnu carried by the mythical bird Garuda. I watched it grow smaller and smaller until even this colossal figure was swallowed by the horizon. It felt like a threshold: the familiar world receding behind us, the open sea expanding ahead.
Then the waves began to rise.
Our boat rose and fell over deep navy swells, some climbing nearly twelve feet from trough to crest. For hours, there was nothing to hold my gaze but water and a vast moving ecosystem breathing beneath us. The motion was meditative and unnerving all at once. Suspended between sea and sky, I felt beautifully small. By the time we reached the Gili Islands, I felt as though we had traveled beyond the edge of the familiar. These tiny islands sit like scattered punctuation in an endless blue sentence, encircled by water and seemingly detached from the urgency of the rest of the world. It was as if I had spiraled into another world and my eyes had been given a new lens through which to see it. Walking the shoreline became a daily ritual of discovery. Shells as large as my hand lay perfectly intact in the sand, each one carrying the architecture of another life. Their spirals were mathematically precise yet completely wild. I would hold one and wonder about the hidden world from which it had surfaced. What lives beneath us? What survives in the places light cannot reach?
The depths of the ocean have fascinated me for years. When I lived in Paris, I visited an exhibition called The Abyss, devoted to creatures living in the deepest regions of the sea. In a world without sunlight, some had evolved to produce their own illumination. They did not wait for light to find them. They made it themselves. I never forgot that. Chronomare was born from these memories: the rise and fall of the passage to Lombok, living by the Pacific Ocean in Northern California, the perfect spiral of a shell in my palm, and those strange, luminous creatures dwelling far below the visible world. The name joins chronos, time, with mare, the sea. Because the ocean keeps its own time. It moves in tides, currents, migrations and ancient cycles. It preserves millions of years inside stone. The deeper we travel, the less meaning our familiar measurements seem to hold. The collection is a descent through four chapters—not simply through the ocean, but through the inner landscapes of our own lives.
