Hi All,
I want to start by introducing myself, my name is Carter Shappy. I am a Maine College of Art alumni currently living in Portland, ME. I focused on printmaking throughout my time at MECA but work with a broad range of media and processes (I’ll dive more into that in my next post).
Last September I reached out to Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and, long story short, we pulled together (with the very wonderful help of MECA faculty member, Jessica Tomlinson) Bigelow’s first ever Artist in Residence. The residency is about 5 weeks in, and will continue for another 9 weeks, resulting in a responsive body of work that will initially be displayed at the Bigelow East Boothbay campus. Throughout this time I have been and will be soaking up as much inspiration and information from life, and all that entails (all of it, even the seemingly mundane), at BLOS (let’s refer to it as BLOS from now on!). From there on out, my personal inclinations and interests will convalesce with the new information from my BLOS experience to create a large site specific installation. Our goal is to shed local light on the cutting edge and incredibly important research that Bigelow is, and has been, doing, and to explore the relationships between artistic and scientific creativity and discovery. We hope, if only for a brief period of time (we hope infinitely more, however), to allow these two somewhat disparate but surprisingly similar communities to engage with one another and exchange ideas and information.
I will be using this blog to share writings, images, videos and anything else I can that relates to my time spent with BLOS. Please stay tuned. There will be plenty more to come!
Carter Shappy