Ever since she was a small girl, artist Heather Green has scavenged
on the beach of the Sea of Cortez, picking up bits of net and fish
bones and crispy seaweed leaves.

“My grandpa built a cabin in the early ’60s in Cholla Bay, north of
Puerto Peñasco,” says Green, a Tucson native. “It’s a one-room
shack.”

But that one room is right on the beach, with unobstructed views of
the sea-green gulf. And even with all of the Rocky Point development of
recent years—the high-rises cluttering the once-small village,
the ships overfishing the waters—Cholla Bay “still feels like
you’re far away,” she says. “It’s blocked by a headland, a
peninsula.”

The populations of sea creatures in the ecologically rich Cortez,
also known as the Gulf of California, have suffered an alarming decline
in recent years, and Green has been moved to make art about the
conflicts between the human species and the species of the deep.

A recent master’s grad of the UA, she did an installation for her
MFA show that was tapped for a prized place in the big Trouble in
Paradise environmental show at the Tucson Museum of Art last
spring. That work, “Tide Cycle,” paired gorgeous little oil paintings
of a chair being carried out to sea with photos of the comings and
goings of the tides, continuously shown on giant viewfinders.

Green’s most recent work, The Ghost Net Project, on view at
the UA Poetry Center, gave her a chance to use all the flotsam and
jetsam she’d been collecting from the beach for years. A collaboration
with poet Katherine Larson, it’s a series of 25 shadow boxes,
constructed from wood salvaged from decomposing shrimp boats, and
filled with nets and weights and lures and shells.

Each box is accompanied by a full-scale poem written by Larson, a
close friend of Green’s who shares her passion for ecological
redemption. Extracts from the poems are etched into the glass fitted
into the front of each box. Their exhibition accompanies a series of
lectures and readings through the fall on art and ecology, co-sponsored
by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Poetry Center.

The Ghost Net Project began at least five years ago.
Green was inspired by some Mexican divers along the Cortez who wanted
to rejuvenate the depleted fishing beds, and turned to the ecology
group CEDO (Intercultural Center for the Study of Deserts and Oceans)
for help.

“They noticed that the species they fished were declining,” she
says.

By allowing certain reserves to lie fallow for a time, the
fishermen, helped by CEDO scientists, successfully “over six years
brought the species back.” Green had put together a CEDO exhibit on
their efforts, but attempts to make her own art about the divers were
faltering.

“I had heaps of fishing debris in my studio,” Green remembers. “I’m
used to painting, and just putting fishing debris in a box didn’t seem
like art. I was struggling with how to resolve this.”

Green had met Larson at CEDO. Larson holds dual UA degrees in
creative writing and in ecology and evolutionary biology, and besides
being a published poet, she’s a research scientist and field ecologist.
She was serving as a field intern at CEDO, and the two women hit it
off.

One day, when the poet was visiting the artist’s Tucson studio, they
brainstormed on how to combine their separate genres, and convert the
fish flotsam into fine art. Suddenly, the solution was obvious: Green
would assemble the objects, and Larson would write poems about
them.

The results are both painterly and poetic, still lifes brought into
the third dimension. As you move from one box to the next, you feel
like you’re wandering the beach from one driftwood pile to another, or
swimming deep underwater, washed by the currents from coral to bone to
shell. The effect is so mesmerizing that you start imagining that the
drone of the Poetry Center air conditioner is the sound of waves
splashing ceaselessly onto the shore. (The only drawback is that in the
glare of the library, it’s sometimes hard to read the words on the
glass.)

The colors are wonderful. The pieces are subtly tinted in the shades
of the sea, that lovely limited palette of blue, gray, ocher and
oyster. Here and there, they’re punctuated by the brilliant red or
orange of a manmade lure.

The rough-hewn boxes, each about 12 inches square and 6 inches deep,
are weathered grays and browns. Copper coils have been sea-soaked into
rich greens. A tiny red cord dangles from rusted metal here; and a pink
and silver fishing line is twisted there.

In “Ghost Net IV,” knotted gray net in thick woven cotton hangs like
a curtain at the front of the box, setting a stage for the artifacts
below, an array of cottony white debris studded with plastic lures in
red and white. Larson’s poetic fragment: “invites daydreams of
refuge.”

“XVI” has a scaly fish skin, silvery white. The animal has been
upended, its open mouth pointed toward the ceiling, and it’s framed by
two pieces of driftwood in a briny gray flecked with white fungus.

These marvelous pieces are as much sculptural as painterly. The
curls of weights and bobbles spiral across the spaces, and arches float
in strong diagonals, while pieces of driftwood soar vertically
upward.

The collaboration between the two artists unfolded in various
ways.

“I started playing around,” Green says. “She started to write poems
inspired by the boxes. Then I would read the poems and make more boxes.
We responded to each other back and forth.”

Sometimes the juxtaposition is surprising. For “XXI,” Green strung
fishing weights on a wire, like beads on necklace. Shaped like tears,
the heavy pieces of metal are used by American sport fishermen, she
says, and make their own contribution to the problems of the gulf.

But Larson saw the swaying shapes and thought of something entirely
different: the women and the birds of the Cortez coast. The words
etched on the box read: “of the Seri woman in sepia, / bare-breasted in
a skirt / of sewn-together / pelican wings.”

Elsewhere, the artists are playful. In “XV,” Green has hung curving
fishhooks from driftwood; they look like galloping seahorses. Larson
played along: “Take the seahorses, / expelled from their father’s womb
/ they flutter upright / translucent / as a baby’s fingernail, a herd
of / ghostly horses.”

The ghosts of the project title are more troubling. A ghost net is
the name given to a fishing net that has been either lost at sea or
deliberately dumped by heedless fishermen. Floating through the water,
ghost nets strangle porpoises and trap birds, Green and Larson explain
in their artists’ statement. The nets are just one more hazard to the
declining populations of sea creatures.

Their crisscross patterns, so pretty in Green’s boxes, are deadly,
just like the weights and hooks and other trash left by fishermen.
Green brings these dangerous objects to our attention, but at the same
time, as the artists write, “they are transformed from objects of ruin
into objects of reverie.”

This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2009.