Above: “Mighty Migration” oil on canvas, 30″ x 40″ © Karen Hackenberg 2011
“I am walking on the Discovery Bay beach outside of Port Townsend WA where I live, swim, and kayak. Collecting colorful plastic cone-shaped tips of washed-up fireworks’ rockets for use in my sculpture, I examine the live pulpy bodies of moon snails in their white shells and the purple velvet “fur” on sand dollars, as well as the stranded plastic bags, the crab shell molts, the squid egg cases, the running shoes, logs, plastic water bottles, shot gun shells, disposable lighters, ropes of bull kelp, nylon ropes, eel grasses, striated stones and glowing agates. I struggle to make sense of this diverse and incongruous debris, and to somehow make peace with its implications.”…