The catalog for my show, Of Sea & Sky @ Traver Gallery was a major feat in and of itself. It shows the work  and completes the story of my collaboration with NOAA's Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program. 

Click in the image below and check it out! 

​They would roost on anything they could wrap their tiny feet around.
​Colorful sun-bleached plastic crates were prime real-estate on the treeless oasis. 

Sometimes I feel like a Frigatebird. 

Fellow field-camper Jon Brack made this wicked 360 video of the Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program field camp at Pearl & Hermes atoll in the Papahanamokuakea Marine National Monument this summer. Jon was with us for six weeks at the beginning of the season [we started the end of April] and played an integral role in setting up the Pearl and Hermes camp. Aside from helping set-up camp infrastructure, he also hepled train the three of us who would remain there until mid-August by showing us how to safely navigate the atoll and survey the local Hawaiian monk seal population.

Friends and Colleagues : Your support and belief in my work has afforded me the ability and privilege to follow my dreams, what a rare and incredible gift! It is with tremendous gratitude for all of you that I announce I have been awarded a 2016 USA Fellowship. Thank you.
 - April 

Though I am a conscious being
I am smaller than a speck of dust; a microbe in the universe.

​Not even that significant.

Yet it is possible that even my tiniest of actions are capable of creating monumental ripple-effect
whether I am aware of or able to reconcile those impacts or not.
 
How do our individual actions create impact and how can we transform negative effects into positive outcomes?
What can we do to learn about the world and life and how can we work together to make constructive change?
 
The more we know, the more we can learn and grow from.
Knowledge is the key to transformation.

I couldn't find the words to describe it...
Most days ended in the form of a drawing.

Spent time thinking. 

PHR WEDS AOK [+ some]
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The low angle of the morning sun absorbs into the marine debris that's scattered along nearly every surface of this tiny island in the middle of the ocean, sparkling all the way down the beach like glitter. Some days it is easy to put on your blinders and step past and over it and others not so much. The most challenging aspect of being here is not the lack of infrastructure, the salt water baths or limited communications but rather trying to process the exorbitant amount of garbage that washes ashore; not to mention what remains in the ocean. Watching the wildlife try to adapt to living with our waste, playing with it, getting entangled in it, is enough to turn ones stomach.
 
Last week I made an onsite installation of the disposable lighters that we've collected. As I was setting up I found a seal entangled in a mess of line and the day before the skeleton of a Laysan Finch stuck in a wad of monofilament. We've picked up nearly 9 bagsters of marine debris around the atoll and cannot see a noticeable difference. With more debris washing ashore with every tide, I see this ecosystem indefinitely smothered with our litter. 

All are well.
 
-April + Team
 
------ Weds Haiku ------
 
Ubiquitously
Sea and sky wrapped around me
Oh! The solace here