This performance/creative work was commissioned by University of California Santa Cruz’s Institute of Arts and Sciences (IAS) to accompany Weather and the Whale, a contemporary art and science exhibition on view from May 29 2025-March 8, 2026.

The piece is a three part experiential meditation in which participants are invited to contemplate whales’ lives and (often untimely) deaths through the materiality of memory—by holding and being-with a bone or baleen from a deceased whale; communicating with a whale or whales through a two million year old fossilized whale ear bone; and finally, washing the ear bone in the sea—a ritual act of care and ancestral veneration.

Performances held: May 27, 28, & June 2, 2025 at Natural Bridges State Beach, Santa Cruz CA.

Many thanks to Dr Ari Friedlaender and the Seymour Marine Center for generously lending eighteen whale bones and pieces of baleen, without which these meditations would not have been possible.