In How You Shimmer: Sound Portal for Whale Bubbles, Yolande Harris transforms digital traces of whales’ underwater movements into heavy bronze spirals, carves the outlines of their bodies on remnants of human bone using a scrimshaw method, and casts them in bronze. Blown glass sculptures evoke the bubble nets formed by the breath of whales working in concert. The installation is an imaginative dive into an otherwise inaccessible world, and a sound portal to join with another species. Accompanying this installation is a single-channel presentation of From a Whale’s Back, an audiovisual work that uses data from scientific tags from Ari Friedlaender’s lab at UC Santa Cruz to study the behaviors of whales to ask us to consider the whales’ relationships to each other as well as our relationship to them.



