Newport artist Mary Chatowski Jameson searches the Third Beach shoreline for material she uses to make remarkably colorful pressed seaweed collages. A member of the Newport Sister City Commission, Jameson plans a trip to Newport’s Irish sister city, Kinsale, and other parts of Ireland later this month into mid-April. She’ll have a gallery exhibition of her work and will host a sold-out workshop where she shares and teaches her collage and cyanotype print techniques. She also hopes to establish an artist-in-residence exchange between Newport and Kinsale. Continue reading for the story of seaweed turned into beautiful art.
She makes what from what? Art from seaweed. That’s right, art from seaweed.
Mary Chatowsky Jameson is taking her talent for making beautiful images from seaweed this spring to Newport’s sister city, the southern coastal town of Kinsale, as a cultural exchange to encourage more of the same. A new member of the city’s Sister City Commission, Jameson hopes to use her position to create a visual art exchange between the two cities.
“There have been cultural exchanges with various sister cities, but no art exchange,” she said. “I’ve been to Kinsale and met artists and gallery owners, and I think we can arrange an artist-in-residence program that would go both ways.”
Jameson has already sold out an April art retreat in Mulranny, a seaside village in the west of Ireland, where she will share her techniques for turning various forms of seaweed and algae into beautiful collages. She did the same last year, and beginning in late March, she’ll have a solo gallery show in Kinsale that will run through April.
“I could accommodate an artist here in our building for two weeks,” she said. “Then, I think the city, through the commission, could arrange for local artists to travel to Kinsale.”
You could say she is on a mission, but she’s used to “missions.” She has turned her seaweed art into a sharing one by offering workshops and classes, and giving demonstrations for several years. She has two set for the Truro Center for the Arts on Cape Cod in May, and she’ll host more at her Saltwater Studios, located in a building on Vernon Avenue that once served as a trolley car garage and has been turned into multi-purpose uses.
Even in a brief conversation, her enthusiasm and knowledge encourage you to learn about something so common that it is mostly ignored or seen as a nuisance. Once you listen to Jameson explain all the different types of seaweed, the history of collecting it, and the dozens of different uses for it, from food preparation to fiber-making, you begin to understand the energy she brings to the subject.
“I knew nothing about it when I first became interested in it,” she said. “I was taking my young son to the beach and showing him the seaweed, and I began to find my own interest in it. I went to an exhibition at the Newport Historical Society, where they had samples of scrapbooks from Victorian times that included seaweed samples as mementoes of summer seaside visits. I became intrigued by that history.”
Soon after, she began learning about artists who incorporated seaweed and seaweed designs in their art, and about techniques for preserving samples, pressing and drying them, and turning them into stunning images. Through trial and error, she developed her own handmade presses, which she makes available to others.
In addition to the collages where seaweed samples are attached directly onto specialized papers, Jameson has ventured into an early photographic printmaking technique called cyanotype, where the samples are exposed to intense light to leave a “shadow” image of sorts. She came to that during her studies of seaweed when she encountered the 19th century British botanist, Anna Atkins, who is credited with publishing the first book utilizing the technique.
Today, Jameson is considered among the best in the country and, if modesty permits, something of an expert on the seemingly endless varieties of algae and seaweed. She has mounted a library of books on the science and history of undersea plants, and can ramble off the names of dozens at a time. Her work has been exhibited at the Newport Art Museum, the New Bedford Whaling Museum and local and regional galleries. The 2023 Whaling Museum exhibition on the cultures of seaweed included examples of her work, and she is quoted in a book of essays produced for the exhibition.
In her pressed collages, Jameson creates brilliantly colorful work resembling floral bouquets. In other cases, her images look like delicate botanical paintings or drawings. She has turned her art into a business that includes everything from notecards and stationery to images on dinnerware and other objects.
“I had no expectations when I first started trying to make images,” she said. “I felt no pressure. I just wanted to learn techniques. Eventually, I started learning about seaweed as a bridge between art and science. It’s interesting, because scientists press seaweed more or less the same way I do, but they do it to study it.”
Jameson’s study nowadays explores how to emphasize the amazingly varied colors of the seaweed both before and after it is dried.
“The whole idea is for everyone to see the beauty of it,” she said. “Most people are familiar with seaweed as this smelly, dry mess on a beach. They don’t recognize how beautiful it can be in nature and in art.”
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