The Roving Ocean Artist Residence (ROAR)

The ocean has a lot to tell us. The ocean spreads wide across the latitudes and longitudes, containing 324 million cubic miles of water, its immense pulse beating a mile a minute. The ocean, making all life on Earth possible. 

Both the sheer vastness and power of the ocean make it hard to access. The Roving Ocean Artist Residence (ROAR) aims to bridge this gap. To allow people to listen to the ocean through expeditions running throughout our oceans. Foundationally, it’s a watery portal to the life of the ocean that allows people to engage the oceanic environments via collaborative, conceptual, and corporeal expeditions. Artists use ephemeral data from the voyages to create new narratives of this place in flux. The work will be presented in an on-going exhibition and an evolving publication available across audiences both real and imagined. The work builds a series of new living portraits of the ocean: stopping not at the water’s edge but continuing until a new extent is discovered; anti-data based in experience and feelings; whale-sized recordings; interplanetary readings, abyssal plain musing, and visual ebb holes. 

Re-contextualizing and sharing a story of the place is ever-crucial because investment in this watery landscape is the key to better stewardship of our oceans. Our expression of the imagination into the ocean is what shifts, erodes, accumulates, and accommodates the shape of more considered futures.

The inaugural residency will take place aboard sv Islander, a Bristol 34, which will be doing a year-long circumnavigation of the globe starting in March 2021 with a double-handed, multi-generational women team. 

Current artists include Zoe Minikes, Alicia Toldi, Mary Welcome, Corbin LaMont, and Jack Forinash. 

If you would like to get involved, please fill out the form here.