Claire Millikin – Mapping the Edge of America: Holdfast!

A strangeness at the heart of the national project has motivated American art since the early years of our history as a colonized land. Before contact, this land we call America was not strange to the Indigenous people living here. It was home. But colonization estranged ordinary senses of home, for colonizers and colonized. Tacitly reflecting the genocide at the foundation of our national origins, a strain of American fine art reaches an uncanny edge, an eerie emptiness of strangers in a strange land. Consider iconic American images created by Edward Hopper and Grant Wood; Benjamin West’s double portrait of Colonel Guy Johnson and Karonghyontye; Carleton Watkins’ landscapes; and Shinnecock photographer Jeremy Dennis’s contemporary tableaux. Maine’s Andrew Wyeth presents vistas of a peculiarly American unresolvable grief. As geographer Harm de Blij notes, North America has experienced a nearly complete replacement of Indigenous people with people whose origins lie in other continents.

Our continent is edged, of course, by oceans, and here on Maine’s densely populated coast we are endlessly aware of the ocean. We are aware of its warming, aware of its nearness to us, and aware of its changing life-force changing us. In the strikingly ecologically minded exhibit Holdfast!, artworks addressing climate change and ocean life connect by thematizing seaweed where the human and benthic worlds entwine: the littoral zone. Curators Celeste Roberge and Ian Ellis have created an exquisite and exemplary reach of imagery, tone, and style in this seaweed and oceanic themed exhibit.  In this article I focus on a few works that map uncanny Americanness onto this edge of America where land meets ocean. In these works, the question of the mapping function of image is leveraged, illuminated, and interrogated.

The line between an image and a map is ambiguous. A photograph of an ocean shoreline may be understood to map that space, but we do not call such a photograph a map because our gaze subsumes the surface of the image into the conceptual frame of seeing rather than that of finding our way by symbolic marks through physical space. And yet photographic technology is intrinsic to contemporary surveying; photogrammetry as a tool of surveying and mapping was developed in the late 19th century, the century of photography’s inception.

Mapping in fine art photography elevates the tactile material presence of medium and substrate so that rather than simply seeing an image of marks, we are made aware of the symbolic and at times immersive contact between medium, substrate, image: the way the image maps the real. The place indicated by the work is mapped by this art that troubles and resists subsummation into image. It retains an indicative quality, as a map must, pointing us to this place, the specific edge of a specific spatial place of ocean meeting land. Here, it says, right here on this shore. This work makes us aware of the ground truth, the earth that persists beyond representation.

The photographic work of Rosalba Breazeale shown in Holdfast! uses seaweed as a substrate for a series of photographic process works titled Symbiotic Relatives: Cochayuyuruna (Seaweed People). The images have the uncanny presence of masks, as if seaweed were being given voice through Breazeale’s original process. At ocean’s edge the teeming life of seaweed, to which Maine fisheries will likely need to shift focus as warming oceans push lobsters further north, in Breazeale’s work takes on the authority of a sacred warning. The seaweed people bear in their “faces” photographic chemicals that map the gaze directly onto the natural substrate of seaweed. Hung against a plain light background on a brick wall of the 20 Winter Street gallery in Rockland, the seaweed masks point to their estrangement from their ocean origin which Breazeale keeps alive by refusing to abstract the gaze into pure image. Instead, the work proffers photographic mapping, layering onto the substance of place a symbolic representation of the act of seeing photographically through silver and light mapped onto seaweed. Breazeale notes “Symbiotic Relatives: Cochayuyuruna (Seaweed People) is part of a larger ongoing photographic installation called Symbiotic Relatives. The name is integral to the work because it is a space-responsive installation of sculptural chemigram prints on silver gelatin paper, created in collaboration with non-human living beings.”

Taking a more traditional approach to the photographic medium, photographer Dave Wade achieves a gorgeously unsettling and somber image of seaweed on the Maine shore. His Blowing Seaweed offers a haunting landscape of seaweed in close frame on a rough gray sandy shore. The plucks and folds of the sand appear like mountains with fine blowing sand around them in a sort of mist, and seaweed that lurches monstrous and powerful hinges the image. Here, photography maps place by coming so close that we touch with our eyes the surface of the Maine shore on a day of tough winds. The eeriness of this image reads almost as a portent when one recalls that the Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming bodies of water in the world and that warming water intensifies storms. Wade notes “Blowing Seaweed is a picture of ongoing change. In it, we are at one with the seaweed, tossed in the wind, out there on the constantly shifting edge of the sand, sky and sea.” Photographed at close range, the image shifts our sense of scale as maps do, and a sense of the risk of maps and their incompleteness, imbues the photograph.

Nicole Wolf’s glistening large scale photographs of seaweed allure in their deep sepia tones and sense of nostalgia, as if the images were screens covering the once living forms rather than pictures thereof. Wolf describes her photography of intertidal zone life in personal and ecological terms: “the project focuses on the resilient and adaptable organisms and habitats that reside there, mirroring the community in which I was raised,” noting that her photographs reflect childhood memories of the intertidal zone, “the sound of waves lapping against the cuddy where I slept on my father’s lobster boat.” Unframed in Holdfast! her poignant intertidal photographs shift on the wall in slow currents of air. 20 Winter Street, the location of Holdfast!, is an easy walk to Rockland’s working waterfront, close to the breakwater and public beach. Wolf’s photographic images dreamily connect the ground truth of what is physically there, the land and its natural forms, and the mapping marks we create as scaled image-concepts facilitating our memory and emotional movements across the land.

Nanci Kahn and Meredith Kennedy’s collaborative cyanotypes on Kozo paper map the materiality of the seaweed imaged. Visually invoking 19th-century British scientist and photographer Anna Atkins whose cyanotypes of botanical specimens have found renewed fame in the 21st century, Khan and Kennedy utilize the process of photograms—photographs created by laying the object to be imaged onto photosensitive paper. Kahn and Kennedy “Americanize” the camera-less early process of photogram (originated by British scientist William Henry Fox Talbot) and the iron salts process of cyanotype (invented by British polymath Sir John Herschel) by enlarging the images and allowing memory traces of a blurred movement and Kozo paper’s undulant edges to communicate a sense of shifting temporariness at odds with Atkin’s stable prints (cyanotype is a fairly permanent photographic technique). This mapping of American blurriness and transitoriness onto British archives of stability is part of the power of Kahn and Kennedy’s cyanotypes. Here, the object is placed to create an at-scale map of itself. The photographs’ titles gesture simultaneously to Atkins’ scientific images and point the viewer to return to the littoral zone with scientific and common names for the seaweeds pictured: Ascophyllum nodosum—Rockweed; Laminaria digitata—Horsetail Kelp; Saccharina latissima—Sugar Kelp; and Agarum cribosum—Sea Colander. The dramatic blues of the images conjure a kind of dream water on the gallery’s wall.

Sculptor verónica a. pérez’s multimedia assemblage historical silencing II, featuring a double photograph, sugar ropes, and braided seaweed, brings urgency to the project of visually mapping Maine’s coast. pérez’s photograph shows an earthwork created by the artist of cast sugar hands reaching up from rough shoreline sand. Paying homage to the Silueta series of Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, pérez’s waving hands poignantly instate a symbol of Indigenous people of the northeast whose populations and culture were decimated by earliest contact on this close-range coastal map. A mirroring darker image twinning the seascape of hands suggests a woman kneeling, but on closer inspection it is seaweed and hair shot up close. It is the afterimage of the sugar hand sculptures after the tide has come in and eaten the sugar. In this use of photography, pérez maps time and place, a specific shore, the movement of time and ocean, and the longer history of historical silencing on this shore. On the floor beneath this mournful photographic diptych, pérez has fashioned a circular braid of seaweed and sugar rope, anchoring the photographic image in the three-dimensional real space of the gallery. Here, the act of mapping a place of violent contact pulls in the viewer. The enigmatic algal and botanical form desiccated and shaped by the artist as one tends the hair of a friend or family member shows immense tender care. It marks a votive gift, acting as a kind of wreath of mourning pulling the visual map (a conceit of mapping is translating three-dimensional place into two-dimensional representative space) of the photograph into the three-dimensional plane of the gallery.

In Holdfast! we are here, in America, in 2026, in Rockland, Maine, in a building on 20 Winter Street, a few steps from the ocean. On my visits to the exhibit, the August days were stiflingly hot, the warming ocean a presence in the unairconditioned gallery, palpable in our human sweat. As one enters the gallery space from the west, sculptor Celeste Roberge’s striking photograph Wet Suit #2 of an acephalous androgynous human form sculpted in seaweed standing on a shore-scape recognizable as the rocky coast of Maine greets you. It is a photograph of Roberge’s original sculpture, also titled Wet Suit #2, made of wax, seaweed, hydrocal, steel, and a repurposed neoprene wet suit, photographed at Kettle Cove, Cape Elizabeth, Maine, on 23 July 2020, part of the artist’s Rising Seas(onal) collection.

The image is large and in color. It acts as a kind of tutelary guidepost, a personified mapping gesture, pointing the visitor into the space of a gallery near a shoreline where the act of holding fast takes on layered meaning. Holdfast! refers directly to the structure of seaweed that attaches to substrate, and yet also carries evocative symbolic heft: How do we hold fast through all the challenges facing this place where we live together? How do we map this place of contact, this shoreline, now?