Courtney Mattison, Artist
“I think art has huge power to inspire people to change their lifestyle choices and become more aware of how they’re connected to everything else.” – Courtney Mattison
Photos: Arthur Evans
Courtney Mattison is an artist and activist – an artivist to use her word – whose goal is to raise public awareness of the scale and severity of the threats facing coral reefs around the world and to inspire action to protect them. She creates huge coral reef sculptures from ceramic, spending countless hours crafting individual coral polyps in meticulous detail in her Denver studio.
She says that it is her diminutive size that gives her such an affinity with corals, but whether it is this, her educational grounding in Marine Biology, or her experiences diving some of the most beautiful reefs in the world, it is clear that this is one artist who is punching above her weight in her efforts to bring the beauty and fragility of these unique underwater worlds to a larger audience. I caught up with Courtney in her Denver studio via Skype to find out more about her work.
An interview with Courtney Mattison
JP: What was it that particularly attracted you to corals and coral reefs originally?
CM: I grew up in California, and from the time I was in high school, when I was 16 years old, I started studying Marine Biology, and my teacher was obsessed with marine invertebrates! I totally credit him for getting me to be the same way. He wasn’t one of those typical Marine Biology teachers who focuses on the fish and the sharks, the predators and charismatic megafauna – which are equally important – but what excited him were the tiny, colourful sea slugs and the little corals and invertebrates that people often overlook.
So he got me really excited about that. Then, after I graduated High School and before I went to university, I got scuba-certified and travelled around in the British Virgin Islands and got to put my head under water for the first time and become comfortable underwater. It was the first time I felt that I could be at home in what seemed like an alien universe, so once I started scuba diving I was hooked and I became totally obsessed with corals.
JP: When you actually put your head underwater for the first time, were you immediately drawn to corals and the smaller creatures?
CM: Absolutely, yes. The first few dives I went on I was just obsessed with going straight to the bottom and then spending basically the whole dive on the same spot looking at all the ‘little guys’. By that time, I’d also already started sculpting coral reef organisms, because from the beginning I found them to be very ‘sculptural’. As I’m a visual, three-dimensional learner, even in my first Biology class in High School I felt like I had to sculpt them to understand them better.
JP: How did you first get into creating your coral installations?
CM: I would say probably towards the end of college. I started sculpting corals in high school, for selfish reasons really, to better understand the anatomy, the forms and colours of coral reef critters, and I kept doing it all through college. I also studied abroad in Australia for about nine months. I went there for a semester in 2007 and then stayed on through the following summer, just so I could get more diving in and take thousands of photos to use as inspiration.
It was after that experience that I realised how threatened coral reefs are because of human activities, and at the same time I started to understand that I needed to do what I was uniquely skilled at if I really wanted to help, because I didn’t feel that I could contribute anything unique as a scientist. Spending time behind the lab bench didn’t really do it for me, and I felt that if I could communicate and translate the science of climate change impacts on corals, coral bleaching, ocean acidification and that kind of thing, then I could inspire people to take action to protect them. So I graduated with that idea, and about a year later I applied to graduate school with that goal in mind – to do something kind of crazy and start making monumental art installations that could be in the public view and could really start inspiring people.
JP: How would you describe the particular power of art to capture the imagination and help people relate to nature?
CM: I think art affects us emotionally, in a way that scientific data often struggles to. When people look at a graph showing levels of coral bleaching over a period of time, that means so much less on a personal and emotional level than seeing a work of art that really translates it in a visual, aesthetically powerful way.
So I think art can make us see the world differently, and can make us connect in unexpected ways to the natural environment that we rely on for life and that we impact every day. I think art has huge power to inspire people to change their lifestyle choices and become more aware of how they’re connected to everything else.
JP: When you see what’s happening around the world with all the coral bleaching and the human pressures on coral reefs, how do you think we can inspire people who perhaps live far away from the ocean or in an urban environment to care about coral reefs and understand their importance on a global level to all of us?
CM: That’s a great question, because so few people actually are lucky enough to go underwater and see these things, and even people that live on the coast often do not or cannot scuba dive or even snorkel to see what is down there. But if we take the Coral Triangle for example – in Indonesia and the Philippines – it is often called the ‘Amazon of the seas’ because it’s at least as diverse as the Amazon rainforest, which most of us know about. A lot of people don’t actually get to see that either, but we appreciate it because it’s on land and we’ve seen so many pictures.
Used well, art and media can be used to help people all over the world, no matter where they live, become familiar with these places and enchanted by their diversity and their beauty and their strange, almost alien life forms that seem to be so other-worldly but that actually are on our own Earth… I think sparking that kind of understanding can be really important in making people aware – because it really is an issue of awareness – about the importance of protecting coral reefs.
JP: At Synchronicity Earth, we’ve worked with Louis Masai, an artist who paints large murals and paintings around urban landscapes thereby reaching an audience which might never normally see them. How do you think your work might be able to reach people who are not able to see it in situ in a gallery?
CM: I think social media has been a huge help in that sense. It’s hard to get photos of my work that represent the way it actually looks in person, because it’s on quite a large scale. But I’ve found that you can communicate things like scale by having a person in front of the work, so it’s a constant experiment. I’m really trying to evolve my social media outreach in new and more impactful ways to communicate because I want my work to have a message beyond just the gallery space.
I love having my work in public places, and also in art galleries and museums because it is often visible to people that know very little about marine science and all the environmental issues impacting the ocean. I have shown my work at scientific institutions also and that has a totally different flavour, because people with a more scientific background are going to see totally different things.
My thesis project for my Masters in Environmental Studies debuted at NOAA HQ in Washington, DC, which is also the Headquarters for the Department of Commerce, so it was right in the lobby, this big marble lobby, and seen by policymakers daily for about five months.
JP: A key focus of the International Coral Reef Symposium in Hawaii this year was on the idea of translating science into policy and the idea, as you’ve been saying, of the science not really speaking to people. How do you reconcile the fact that there’s so much more science and research going into coral reefs and yet it’s still on a massive downward trend in terms of their health and survival? You talk about inspiring policy-makers on your website – how do you think we can really help to better convey what the scientists are finding in order to bring about actual policy change?
CM: That’s a tough question, because policy-makers are facing so many competing priorities, which are often very short-term. First of all, it’s going to take a gigantic push from the general public to get policy-makers to really show that they believe in climate change through their actions, especially in the US.
I was in Australia in April and by total coincidence I went diving on the Great Barrier Reef at the peak of the coral bleaching – it was the week that they reported that 93% of the Great Barrier Reef had bleached – and I was there in the water looking at it and almost crying behind my scuba mask.
Policy-makers could do so much. There is growing momentum and I am hopeful, but I just hope it’s not too little too late because we are very, very obviously at a tipping point right now for coral reefs and climate change. But at least it’s getting headlines, and there’s a lot of buzz going on in the media that’s forcing policy-makers to pay attention. The question is whether we can maintain that and get countries to, as a bare minimum, abide by the COP21 Paris agreement, or ideally go further.
JP: How do you go from raising awareness to actually inspiring concrete, positive action, and what kind of actions can people take to protect coral reefs?
CM: That’s a great question. I think the first step is awareness. Sylvia Earle always says the biggest problem the ocean faces is ignorance, and ignorance needs to be tackled before people will be inspired to act. That’s the crux of what I’m going for with my work.
But I also hope that my work can inspire people to become curious enough to understand how reefs are important to them personally, and to realise how we are all connected, from our CO2 emissions to our love of seafood to using fossil fuels all the time to get around – there are so many ways in which each of us can reduce our impact as individuals.
I think it’s going to take a movement, a united effort of millions of people around the world demanding policy change and demanding resources to make renewable energy affordable to really help. It can feel like the problems are too big to solve as one person, but I do believe that individuals, by teaching each other and by learning how they’re connected, by making demands and voting – including voting with their money as consumers – can demand change.
JP: When you display your work, how do you describe it to people? Are there descriptions that go alongside each installation, or do you let people bring their own interpretations to it?
CM: It has kind of evolved. At first, I felt like I needed to inundate people with a load of text that explained every little thing, but I think as I’ve gotten stronger as an artist and developed ways that I believe communicate visually what I’m trying to say, I’ve started including less text. So, usually I just include a one or two paragraph artist statement that talks briefly about why coral reefs are in trouble i.e. climate change, overfishing and pollution. Then I also add something about my background and how, as one small person creating these gigantic installations, I hope to be able to get people to feel like they’re connected to the ocean on an individual level, interacting with it in some way.
It seems like people generally understand what I’m trying to say now, whereas before, for example the piece I had at NOAA Headquarters, that was probably a little bit visually harder to understand because you had to know some context. It was hard for people to understand by just looking at it without me telling them that there was this transition in the piece from really healthy, vibrant, diverse coral reef to bleached and then really degraded at the top. So I’m simplifying those aesthetic messages, and I think I’m finally figuring out how to communicate that in a clearer way.
JP: Thank you!