Projects
SeaWalls: Artists for Oceans · Cozumel, Mexico · 2014
This mural marked my first official project with PangeaSeed Foundation and SeaWalls: Artists for Oceans, beginning a relationship that would shape a significant chapter of my public art practice.
I had first visited Cozumel as a teenager, driving dirt roads in an ancient red jeep with the full mythic charge of first freedom and French kisses on the beach. Returning nearly twenty years later, I found an island barely recognizable – still beautiful, but tourism and development had changed the face I remembered.
The distance between memory and what stood before me shaped this painting.
The mural became a tribute to Jacques Cousteau, whose films and explorations brought the ocean into the lives of people who might never encounter its depths themselves.
He helped make an unfamiliar world feel worth knowing — and worth protecting.
I combined his portrait with crashing waves, plastic waste and a large hand bearing the wound of the stigmata, water flowing through its palm. In Cozumel, the image drew on a Catholic visual language deeply present in Mexican culture – equal parts homage, warning, and prayer.
The image held a contradiction I felt on returning to Cozumel: our capacity to love a place, and our capacity to damage it.
SeaWalls brought artists from around the world together around ocean conservation. It was an early encounter with the possibilities of working toward an environmental purpose at scale.
What stayed with me was the commitment of the people involved. Artists travelled long distances, contributed their time and labour, and worked through difficult conditions to put something into public view.
Being among them expanded my sense of what a mural could participate in. Each wall was an individual work, but it also belonged to a larger effort to bring the ocean — and the pressures upon it — into everyday conversation.
The work itself required considerable improvisation. Heat, limited equipment and a compressed schedule shaped each day.
Early in production, a ladder unsuited to the job slipped beneath me while I was near the top. I landed hard on both heels. I worked through the pain to finish the mural, and still live with the consequences today.
The finished photograph holds little of that experience.
The project opened into many years of incredible collaborations, friendships, travel and environmental work through SeaWalls.
It also strengthened a conviction that continues to shape my practice: learning to care for a place often begins with an attachment to it. An image can invite that attachment, making something distant feel close enough to matter.
Whether that feeling becomes action is a harder question.
It is easy to fall in love on a beach.
The harder work is learning how to protect what you love.
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© Jason Botkin