This room is submerged in darkness. Shapes of light move on three walls. Walk towards them.
The process of making the lace oysters offered an opportunity to explore the processes of oyster reef growth and collapse.
In ‘Collapse’, a reef community falls apart as the soluble fabric that forms the substrate for the stitched oysters dissolves.
In ‘Dissolution’, oyster shells seem to dissolve or decompose – a threat to shellfish of climate change. Warming seas become more acidic, and it becomes more difficult for molluscs to grow their calcium shells. Eventually those shells begin to dissolve. In my material analogy, unfired clay oysters slake away to reveal lace skeletons.
In ‘Accrescendo’, lace oysters are added to a growing reef, before the process is reversed. Can you hear the clicking, tinking, snap-crackle-popping sound, rising and then falling in volume, as the reef grows and shrinks? This is the sound of a healthy shellfish reef, mainly the percussion of tiny snapping shrimp. In 2022, researchers at the University of South Australia, found that oyster larvae were attracted by this sound, many thousands more oyster larvae settling near underwater speakers playing this reef soundscape. The veligers (second-stage larvae) ‘feel’ sound through statocysts, sensory organs covered with tiny hairs. The sounds of a healthy reef indicate a favourable environment, and the location where a veliger settles is critical - once attached to its substrate, an oyster cannot voluntarily move again.
Here you can also see two of the earliest works I made when I first started exploring the history of the shellfish reefs and Ostrea angasi.
On the TV screen is ‘Drift’, made near Eden, as I contemplated the disappearance of the flat oyster. What happens over the 4 minutes of this video?
Spotlit on the wall near the door is ‘Invocation’, which traces the life of the angasi in reverse from the big weathered ancient shells of my first encounter, back through their maturity to their youth.
An invocation is a call for help from a higher power, or an attempt to call up a particular feeling or memory. This was a first gesture towards calling back the memory of the reefs, and calling back the oysters themselves.
Come now to the spotlit table, and become part of a collective invocation - an artwork called ‘Reef Knot’.
A reef knot is a binding knot.
Take a slip of tracing paper and write your invitation – call – invocation – summoning – to the flat oysters. What do you feel? What do you hope? What do you want to remember?
Scroll, fold, scrunch or lay your message into the concave side of an oyster shell. Do you want your message to be hidden or visible? Clear or obscure? Place it accordingly.
Now choose a coloured thread and wrap the thread around the shell – a web, a net, a binding spell. Tie it off.
Add your oyster to our growing reef.
A shellfish reef is a community. Elders live, breed, build and leave their carapace as a foundation for the next generation. Many of us picture our intergenerational human lives the same way, working to build and leave behind a foundation for our children.
Reef restoration has brought people together around Australia. They have formed new partnerships, gathered to sort and scrub oyster and mussel shells, and worked together to observe and monitor new reefs as they grow.
The substrate has been sunk, and the spat scattered. Now the potential new reefs are largely out of sight. Each restoration site is, to some extent, an experiment. It is too early to tell if these projects will grow new reefs in the long-term.
But spats, almost too small to see, still swim through the vast ocean, attach to a shell, and begin to grow. Growing oysters attract other species with the offer of shelter, food, and clean water., growing reefs call more oysters to join them With their staccato siren song. Let’s add our voices to their chorus.
mud
oysters
cool wet shells
heavy in my hands
brown and cream and green
alive, mouths clamped shut
by strong adductors
holding tight