seaweed vision

viewmaster, pressed seaweed, poetry

dear land farmer,

if your bones creek as you lay down to sleep
less you push yourself through to make
the rush of your way can’t keep the hurl at bay
while you wait in your smell of brine and swell

then wash your bones in the mother creek
and follow it down where the oysters sleep
and when tide pulls out on a moonless night
as you slide through the water, you’ll make your own light
at the rush and the whirl there’s only one way
the water will hurl you gently out to the bay
there if you wait in the calm you will smell
sea brine and seaweed drawing you to the swell.

This project was produced as coursework for Camille’s MFA at Royal College of Art and showed in the David Hockney gallery as part of the show ‘BOUYANCY’ curated by Mia Barraka and Cassidy Conway Cole.

On 1 March 2025, a federally funded grant program that supported the development of small scale aquaculture operations in coastal Maine, USA was terminated.The gulf of Maine is the fastest warming area of sea on the globe, and the lobsterfishers who make their livelihood there are deeply aware of the inevitable collapse of the fishery. Lobsterers often own their own businesses, and because of this, they typically reap a fair profit. Aware that this livelihood is now extremely temporary, lobsterers and others have turned to a form of food production that is resilient to climate change, and, when done right, beneficial to ocean ecosystems: seaweed farming. In Maine, there has been a boom of small scale seaweed farming, where growers own their own businesses. Typical primary food growers, people who farm on land, often are at the whims of big agricultural companies and poorly structured government subsidy systems that trap them in a cycle of harming their own land through the application of fertilizers and pesticides, and intensive machinery use. For the sea farmers, this is not the case, but the independent coastal economy is under threat.

In ‘seaweed vision’ Camille imagines a near future world where, with the end of this federal grant funding, a resistance movement of seafarmers flourishes. Rather than accepting an industrial agricultural takeover, they develop into a cooperative community of seaweed farmers. Inside a viewmaster, on the reel, a seafarmer has written a ruttier, a poem historically used by sea navigators to show them the way. The ruttier has specific references to a real place in coastal Maine, that would be identifiable to an individual with a relationship to that landscape.

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