Let’s get prefixal. Move across. Move under. Under and across, over and beneath. Imagine or act out floating like a jellyfish. Squat and then stand tall as slowly as you can to embody the diurnal vertical migration of plankton. The next time you find water—be it your bathtub or a larger water body—imagine returning to your beginning in amniotic fluid. Connect intuitively to the origin of all life on Earth. Psychically feel the steamy, hot, fizzing, stirring, volatile chemical oceanic soup near a hydrothermal vent and generate a sense of becoming with the extremophiles. 

This syllabus slips between sea and land, with hyperlink references to follow, books to read, and a music playlist to encourage feeling the rhythms of bubbling curiosity for this wondrous world.

My latest research has me moving in subterranean worlds, ever below the horizons, searching for grounding through largely conceptual travel into marine worlds. I want to imbue my paintings with seemingly separate universes of biodiversity on land and sea, and to work with an aura of awe and wonder for worlds vastly different than my own. 

To enter the subterranean and entertain the subversive, subaltern, subliminal, and my subcutaneous depths, I needed to consider myself a submerging artist. Some of my guides for submerging into the deep included the beautiful texts pictured above. As a collection, I learned from them the wild scientific poetry of the perceptual abilities of animals, tales of reworlding lost lives into fugitive ancestral adaptations, and ways to weave ecoautotheory, or autobiographical narratives informed by ecologies.

Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
Cynthia Barnett, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans
Susan Casey, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean
Sabrina Imbler, How Far the Light Reaches
Rivers Solomon, The Deep
Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean and the Looming Threat That Imperils It
Rachel Carson, The Sea Trilogy 
Robert MacFarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

In the midst of thinking about layered ecologies, deep ocean life, and geological time, I took a trip to Yellowstone National Park (yes, I highly recommend visiting). No matter where I travel, I’m bound to return to thinking about microbes, and the park was a place I have long fantasized visiting to witness the brilliance of the bacterial extremophiles. I enjoy thinking about the power of change contained in all of the smallest of the small life forms—microbes, fungi, and other single-celled organisms. Through fermentation and the microbial, I take pleasure in slipping around between scales (in all senses of scales) to take on perceptual possibilities that queerly and trans-ly question hierarchy and normative conditions of belonging. In the place referred to as Yellowstone, a truly spiritual and magical effervescence is felt in the bubbling, plopping, hissing, spewing, trickling animated crust of the earth. Though a very different place from the bottom of the ocean, both are hydrothermal ecosystems that are flush with colonies of microbes endemic to the liminal spaces intimately tied to Earth’s molten core.

Out of this artistic research I am creating hybrid sculptural paintings that take their exterior forms from marine life whose surfaces are enlivened with casts of cultivated plants obtained from farmers near my home in Kansas City. Where I live is known for its rural economic/agricultural/ monocultural land use, and its colonially scarred, prefixally-weighted conditions of androleukoheteropetromodernity. (Morton/Boyer, Hyposubjects p.15) In making this work, I am curious about how a seemingly binary pairing of agricultural plants and marine life forms in the work can convene with questions about how the deepest places in the ocean are affected by industrial activity in non-coastal places like Kansas. In other words, how anthropogenic climate change is affecting the deepest and most remote ecosystems on earth. The picture of a plastic bag in the Mariana Trench comes to mind. 

Plastics and plankton unfortunately have something in common. Plankton means wandering, roaming, or drifting, from the Greek planktos. I imagine a dive with plankton as an intentional wandering with diasporic forms, diasporic means of resistance and persistence to continually seek enrichment and emergent strategies. Plankton and the microbes teach me that we have much to learn about home through wandering and meeting strangers. That being on the verge of being eaten, being engulfed, might require a “flow state” of presence within a flow of multiple interdependent beings within a medium that catalyzed life on Earth. Alternately, what do we learn about staying in place to create new mutualisms, understandings, and belongings? Now that we know that plastic has wandered to become embedded in deep ocean life forms, what will happen with this information? 

My own sense of knowing a place deeply has been buoyed (once you get into marine puns you see them everywhere) by relationships with humans and more-than-human kin involved in ecospheric care work. Even as large scale agriculture is a major contributor to climate collapse, our relationship to cultivating plants and animals as food and medicine is completely intertwined with the consortium called the human. Indigenous ingenious agroecological practices are imperative for ongoing relations with righting ecosystem collapse. To this end, I would like to introduce you to some reasons I love the prairie, and to encourage a visit or at least a detour from the interstate if you are traveling through. 

Based here in Kansas, The Land Institute is working to develop Kernza, a perennial grain crop. Kernza’s roots grow really, really deep and could be a radical alternative to supplant (again, all puns intended) annual grain crops, mostly grown as monocultures. Experimental crops grown by researchers all around the world are contributing to TLI’s goal to develop a perennial grain that would not only be climate resilient but carbon sequestering, too. You can purchase Kernza, bake with it, and contribute your recipes to their citizen science project. 

One of the reasons I was interested in researching marine life is because I became more familiar with the geology of Kansas and the prairie. Near where I live is an ecological region called the Flint Hills. This area contains the largest remaining portion of a tallgrass prairie ecosystem that stretched from what is now Texas to Canada. The Flint Hills, is so named from the flint, or chert rocks that prevented plowing the hills for agricultural use, with the exception of the bottomlands surrounding watersheds. This entire area was once a shallow sea, home to mosasaurs and many other now extinct marine creatures that can be found in their fossil forms. I recommend a visit to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve to learn more about this ecological region, Indigenous peoples’ relationships with the prairie, including the bison, which were nearly driven to extinction along with Indigenous people.  

The native tall grasses of the prairie often remind visitors and locals of ocean waves as the rustling, shimmering grasses wash over the senses in an embodied remembering of poetic deep time. 

I have committed this well-known Octavia Butler quote to memory in a time when it is difficult to be queer and trans in Kansas.

All that you touch you change
All that you change changes you
The only lasting truth is change
God is Change

—Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

Cultivating intimacy with the lasting forces of change reflected in the prairie can remind me that queer and trans ecologies, ecological framings that honor change and liberation, are present, lively, and give grounding in the face of the unknown.

Here’s a playlist to listen to while you drift around in the Syllabus!

For more about my sculptural paintings that take their exterior shapes from marine creature bodies, please see my 2023 lecture for the Nerman Museum.

transSUBs is referenced in bad tats, jesus christ, lemons; everything is archival, a syllabus by Nasir Anthony Montalvo.