Plankton Painting

My Plankton Paintings are created from video recordings of pond and harbor water collected around Boston and viewed through a light microscope. The word plankton comes from the Greek planktos, meaning “drifter.” Using algorithmic image summation- similar to a long photographic exposure- I compress movement through time, revealing the trails and paths traced by countless microscopic organisms swimming across the slide. The resulting images resemble automatic drawings or abstract paintings, but every mark is created by a living creature moving within a space only millimeters wide. Some organisms dart across the frame in less than a second, while others carve slower, looping paths. What appears abstract is actually a record of behavior: searching, feeding, avoiding, drifting, colliding. Rather than a single artist composing a canvas, these works contain multitudes of tiny makers, each contributing to the final composition through movement and chance.

The project began during the isolation of the 2020 pandemic, when collecting pond water became a weekly ritual. With a microscope in my living room, I spent hours observing vivid microscopic worlds brimming with life. Over time, I became deeply attached to these organisms and increasingly fascinated by their apparent agency. They react, pursue, hesitate, flee, investigate, and constantly negotiate their environments in ways that can feel surprisingly familiar. The more time I spend watching plankton, the more difficult they become to dismiss as anonymous microscopic life. Though nearly invisible to us, plankton form the foundation of aquatic food webs and are among the most abundant forms of life on Earth. By magnifying these unseen worlds, I hope to draw attention to the beauty, complexity, and aliveness of microscopic ecosystems increasingly disrupted by climate change and human activity.