Echoing Currents, a solo exhibition of sculpture, is on view now at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, Monday-Friday, through 2024.
Summer 2024 reception to be announced soon…
Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences
60 Bigelow Drive
East Boothbay, Maine 04544
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Daisy Braun’s sculptures are on view in the Maine Maritime Museum’s front atrium through 2024.
Maine Maritime Museum
243 Washington Street
Bath, Maine 04530
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Braun’s sculpture Drifter is on display at angelrox, a local clothing designer & manufacturer, located in an historic textile mill in Biddeford, Maine.
40 Main Street, Suite 13-109
Biddeford, Maine 04005
Exoskeleton was featured in Catalyst, the 26th Annual Benefit Fashion Show at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
April 12 and 13, 2019
1301 West Mount Royal Ave., Baltimore, MD
Artist Statement
Exoskeleton explores the potential of a boundary — to protect, to inhibit, to consecrate, to enliven. The forms used are often paradoxical; their ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ seem to run into each other. The unbroken nature of these forms connects them with regeneration.
Largely inspired by the silhouettes of plankton, these sculptural garments envelop each model within a semi-transparent membrane. Much of life on Earth evolved from plankton, and all life depends upon them to survive. They are a reminder that the planet is one vast, ongoing web. By fabricating microorganisms at human-scale, Exoskeleton reflects on our bodily link to Earth’s past, present, and future.
Photos by Christopher Myers
534 Congress Street, Portland, Maine
September 4, 2020 – October 2, 2020
This work was created (in part) during my three week residency in SPACE’s artist studio. During the residency, I was interviewed about the show and my practice by Carolyn Wachnicki, SPACE’s Exhibition Manager and Designer.
Artist Statement
For millennia, plankton have floated through the world’s oceans, carried by the current. They inhabited the sea before the continents held life, when the winds blew over bare rock. They endured as the world developed language, myth, agriculture, machinery, and mass culture. They continue to drift today – outside our awareness, despite the vital bond we share. Plankton produce over half of earth’s oxygen; every other breath we take is credited to plankton. They are essential to the food chain, and other elemental cycles. All life depends on plankton to survive.
As plankton affect us, we affect them. Human greenhouse gas emissions are changing ocean temperatures globally, and altering plankton’s life cycles. These changes ripple throughout the world’s ecosystems. By fabricating plankton at human-scale, this installation reflects our bodily link to earth’s past, present, and future.
Considerations
• Environmental injustice is bound to racial injustice. Climate change and pollution disproportionately affect people of color, as well as people living in poverty.
• Does your city have a plan to reduce local greenhouse gas emissions? If not, write to your city council members (or your state senators and representatives) and express your interest.
• Maine has a plan! Check out groups like the Maine Climate Council and Portland’s Sustainability Office (see their Climate Action Plan with South Portland).
Image credits: Joel Tsui and Carolyn Wachnicki
The window installation to the right of DR/FT (in the last photo) was created by Ryan Adams.
Maine Coastal Ecology Center
Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve
342 Laudholm Farm Rd, Wells ME 04090
July 22 – August 22, 2022
Reception: Thursday, August 11, 2022, 5-7pm
Exhibition funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Photographs by Heather Wasklewicz
In February 2023, I spent two weeks aboard the 261-foot oceanic Research Vessel Sikuliaq, as the Hatfield Marine Science Center’s Artist at Sea resident, with a team studying zooplankton off the Oregon and Washington coasts. This residency was also in partnership with the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and was funded by the National Science Foundation.
There were about 45 of us aboard; half were crew, half were science team. I was the artist. For me, this meant I was a sponge. I wanted to learn about everything––the ship, the science, the tools, the ocean, the people and their stories. I took endless notes and sketches. Shifts were around the clock, so there was always something going on. I barely wanted to sleep! I fell in love with it all, being on that boat with those people.
I wanted to give the scientists and crew a chance to make art together at sea, so I brought my screenprinting supplies with me. I held three screenprinting sessions in the Wet Lab throughout the cruise, open to all. It was so much fun! The team turned out incredible work, much of it plankton-inspired. It was so cool to see how they each approached their ideas and materials.
Since returning from the cruise, I am in the process of developing sculptures inspired by the team and their research. The work will be presented in Oregon in 2024.
More about the science aboard:
This was one of six SPECTRA cruises, an NSF-funded project led by Bob Cowen, Su Sponaugle (Oregon State University), and Kelly Sutherland (University of Oregon). SPECTRA is short for "Plankton Size Spectra and Trophic Links in a Dynamic Ocean." Plankton are difficult to sample because their sizes span more than six orders of magnitude, from less than one micron to meters. Relative size dictates many ecological and physiological processes, so the theory of size spectra (the relationship between size and organism abundance, which drives food webs) provides a valuable framework for forecasting climate change impacts on marine ecosystems. The dynamic, highly productive northern California Current off Oregon and Washington in summer and winter seasons produce a patchwork of oceanographic conditions including those associated with hypoxia and ocean acidification. The SPECTRA project samples the plankton communities in this region to investigate how gradients of temperature, nutrients, dissolved oxygen, and pH conditions impact size spectra.
This short film by Ellie Lafferty details ISIIS, a submersible system used by the SPECTRA team to sample plankton.
The screenprinting photos on this page are also courtesy of Ellie Lafferty.
*** Although the gallery show ( meeting the current ) has ended, Daisy Braun’s two largest sculptures remain on view in the Maine Maritime Museum’s front atrium through 2024.
meeting the current
June 20 - July 16, 2022
Opening reception: June 23, 2022, 5-7 pm
Maine Maritime Museum
243 Washington Street
Bath, Maine 04530
Exhibition funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Millenáris Park, Budapest, Hungary
October 2 - 6, 2019
Daisy Braun and Fanni Somogyi created their site-specific, two-woman show Communal Current (Közös jelen-áramlást) for Art Market Budapest, a five day international art fair in Hungary. Somogyi's sculptures were standing, and Braun's were worn by local Hungarian performers who moved throughout the public. Braun’s wearable sculptures were inspired by plankton – learn more about her creative fascination with plankton here.
Communal Current was supported by Gallery Out of Home.
Plankton performance schedule:
October 2nd 17:00 - 21:00
October 3rd 15:00 - 19:00
October 4th 16:00 - 18:00
October 5th 15:00 - 19:00
October 6th 16:00 - 18:00
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Fanni and I traveled to Budapest three weeks before the fair opened. We made all our preparations for the show during that very short time– I created my three pieces there, in a warehouse space, while Fanni welded and shaped her own sculptures across the room. At the same time I was frantically trying to find performers. I wouldn’t have found them without Fanni’s organization, patience, and fluency in Hungarian. (Check out the first poster we made to recruit people. “Legyél te is plankton” = “Be the Plankton.”) The eleven people who ended up wearing my sculptures made this exhibition endlessly fun, despite the language barrier.
I also really enjoyed speaking with the public over the course of the fair. Most people were there for the event, but many were there to use the park outside the venue, especially families. It was so cool to see how children and people passing through reacted to the performers.
Original screen prints from four different editions of the same design. Eight prints per edition.
Each print is 15" x 11 1/4”
September 2016
October 2019
Budapest, Hungary
This image was made through an unexpected collaboration with Dino Rekanović and Torsten Wieczorek, two Viennese photographers who use the wet plate collodion process. We met while exhibiting at Art Market Budapest, and they offered to photograph one of my performers. Maybe one day we’ll make a silent film together…
Illustrations for Stalker, a monograph by Jon Hoel, which examines Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film of the same name. The book was published in February 2021 through Auteur, an imprint of Liverpool University Press.
The book is available here (US) and here (UK).
The illustrations were done in traditional pen and ink.
April 2018
Hand drawn animation. Pen on paper.
An edition of 8 screen printed monoprints.
Monoprinting is a form of printmaking where the image can only be made once, unlike most printmaking which allows for multiple originals. Each monoprint is singularly unique.
These prints were really fun to make, probably because the process of monoprinting is so freeing. I played with color and composition as I went along. Each print I made seemed to give me new ideas for the next. :-)
Each print is 15" x 11 1/4"
October 2016
May 17 – 20, 2019
1400 Cathedral Street, Baltimore, MD
A two woman show with Fanni Somogyi.
Artist Statement
All around us, there are currents. Power lines encircle the globe. Great fungal networks stretch out in the soil beneath our feet, while neural networks make up our minds. The ancient currents of the ocean make life possible. The world is an ongoing web, where each part depends on all others. Currents of time overlap each other, and in these material layers we find tangible traces of the past. As our place in time becomes multi-layered, we enter a space of fluidity: we are collocated within the current.
2017
I made this looping animation after viewing Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) for the first time.
Hand drawn, pen on paper.
I screen printed two decks of 54 original playing cards (including two jokers per deck), and constructed and printed a box for each deck.
I ganged and printed each full deck on just two sheets of paper – one sheet had the complete three color printing for diamonds and hearts (red, blue, and yellow), and the other had the complete three color printing for spades and clubs (black, red, and yellow). After all that was finished, I aligned my design for the card backs (on the flip side). The backs were printed in one color. I hand-trimmed the complete, two-sided sheets to make the individual cards.
The second photo shows all face cards in the deck, with an example of the design printed on the back of every card (to the far right.)
The card backs are also visible in the last photo.
Each card is 3.5" x 2.5"
December 2016
My cover illustration for the 2016 Island Directory, a phone book connecting the islanders of Casco Bay, Maine.
