Mural-Canoe: On Building Something That Stays

Note:

My senior capstone — VIS 190, spring 2023 — resulted in work that is now permanently installed at the Kendall-Frost Marsh Reserve Field Station and Community Learning Center in Mission Bay, San Diego. The project was later featured as part of Embodied Pacific, a Getty-supported PST ART exhibition exploring the art and science of oceanographic and Indigenous maritime design. I was the curator: responsible for the spatial arrangement, the conceptual framework, and how all the pieces held together as a whole. This is an account of what we made and why.

There is a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from making something that doesn't go away when the quarter ends. Most student work lives in a folder, a portfolio, a graded submission. This one is installed at a marsh reserve, which means it is, in some sense, permanent — or at least as permanent as things made from up-cycled painted metal panels can be, sitting at the edge of a tidal salt marsh in San Diego.

The project began with a mural. Artist Celeste Byers had painted it years earlier on the exterior of the old research trailer at the Kendall-Frost Marsh Reserve — a beautiful and bright piece reflective of the location, history, people, and science. When the trailer was decommissioned to make way for the new Kendall-Frost Field Station and Community Learning Center, the question arose of what to do with Byers' work. The answer, arrived at through a collaboration with UCSD's Visual Arts department, was to not let it disappear. The panels were salvaged. Our class — the Speculative Design Major Class of 2023, led by advisor Sakman Mario Borja and Prof. Lisa Cartwright— was commissioned to transform them into something new.

What emerged was seven canoes and a bench, fabricated from the serrated painted metal panels of the original mural. The canoes are not functional in the water-going sense; they are objects that carry meaning rather than passengers. The mural's imagery — the marsh, the birds, the interwoven layers of a living ecosystem — became the surface of the vessels, so that the act of transformation was also an act of continuity. Nothing was discarded. Everything was redirected.

My role was curatorial (and of course hands-on). That meant thinking about how the pieces existed in relation to each other and to the space — what the project could look like, where each canoe sat, how the arrangement created movement through the installation, what a visitor encountered first and what revealed itself over time. It also meant thinking about the conceptual logic that held everything together, which required understanding what a canoe actually is and has been, beyond its physical form.

That understanding was part of the coursework itself. The project was not only about fabrication — it was about research. We studied the Indigenous canoe as a technological, cultural, and navigational object: the mathematics of hull design, the physics of paddling, the way different coastal and island communities encoded knowledge into the construction of their vessels. The Chamorro sakman, the Kumeyaay ha kwaiyo, the Pacific proa — these are not decorative objects. They are sophisticated engineering solutions developed over centuries, carrying within their forms the accumulated intelligence of people who navigated by stars and currents and wind. Several of us in the class made artistic representations of sails and rigging, translating that knowledge into visual form. We repurposed an antique table — fitted with a model boat and enclosed to create a self-contained environment — functioned as a kind of diorama of this research, a way of making the conceptual tangible and accessible to visitors who might encounter the installation without context.

The project found a longer life than we anticipated. It was later included in Embodied Pacific, a Getty-supported PST ART: Art & Science Collide exhibition that brought together thirty artists working with scientists and Indigenous communities across Southern California and the Pacific Islands. The exhibition asked, collectively, how ocean science and Indigenous maritime knowledge might be held in the same frame — not as opposites, not as tradition versus technology, but as different forms of the same deep attentiveness to water, to movement, to what it means to navigate a world that does not hold still.

The canoes are still there. The marsh is still there. The Ridgway's rail, endangered and persistent, is still nesting in the cordgrass. Some things, it turns out, are worth building to last.