Acrylic and ink on canvas

In these paintings, I look closely at sargassum—that golden weed of the sea, once drifting quietly in the open Atlantic, now washing up in thick, suffocating blankets on Caribbean shores. What once moved freely with the tides now arrives swollen, fermenting in the sun, turning our beaches into sites of quiet ruin.

I paint its knots and tendrils not just as a biological study, but as a mirror. In its tangled forms, I see echoes of ancestral roots, colonial maps, the twisted cord between life and death. Sargassum is a reminder that the sea does not forget. It brings gifts and ghosts alike.

In the Caribbean, the sea is more than landscape—it is memory, mother, and grave. We are born with salt in our blood, and many of our stories end at the water’s edge. The sargassum calls us to remember what festers when we forget the balance. It calls us to consider decay not as failure, but as part of the rhythm. As the old people say, “to live sweet, you must make peace with the sour.”

This work is a meditation on death—not as an end, but as a necessary presence. The putrefaction of the sargassum is not just ecological; it is spiritual. It asks us to face what we bury, to wade into what we fear. Only then can we return to ourselves—salted, weathered, and more alive.