Artist Stephanie King’s work of mixed media and botanical illustrations containing real seaweed and botanical pressings. The works in this series offer both a realistic and whimsical assemblage of time and place. Stephanie takes a Victorian tradition of seaweed pressing into the future with modern shapes and ideas while pushing traditional boundaries and approaches. Stephanie focuses on creating natural abstractions through material exploration, drawing inspiration from the colors, patterns and textures found within the seascape. Each design strikes a balance between experimentation and refinement.

Pressing seaweeds and botanicals offers Stephanie unlimited inspiration, peace, joy and hope. Working with a ‘wet medium’ has helped her surrender to the flow and learn to embrace the constant changing tides of life in all of its rhythmic cycles. Each piece of art is transformed into a piece of natural history; a unique fingerprint created from the specific seaside environment where its raw materials were collected. Stephanie is endlessly fascinated by the beauty and complexity of seaweed and botanicals in their natural environments. Along with being used as an art medium, seaweeds are important ecological resources, producing oxygen while absorbing carbon dioxide in marine environments and play a major role in the maintenance of the earth’s ecosystem.

In the early Victorian era, seaweed collecting was a popular past time among those women who had the means to travel to the English coast. Women gathered these ‘flowers of the sea’ and dried and pressed them in albums as memories of their seaside visits. Local botanicals were also admired and included into scrapbooks along with poetry, watercolors and anything that reminded them of their joyful experience. All of the seaweed in this exhibit was personally foraged and ethically sourced by the artist from locations along the Atlantic coast of Massachusetts, Maine and England, UK.

Dates: February 12, 2025 – June 8, 2025