Variations on Adaptation

   April 30, 2026  Leave a Comment on Variations on Adaptation  Posted in Artwork
Variations on Adaptation
(6 panels, each 30×15 inches, acrylic gouache on illustration board)
—Collection of six paintings accompanied by an original concrete poem in hand-bound artist booklets made for Illustration Masters Studio, fall 2022 at Rhode Island School of Design. The panels illustrate a story of resilience and acclimatization and invite the viewer to reflect on their own ideas of eternity.

Click images to enlarge.

Who witnessed our primeval planet and lived to tell the tale?
The sea creature, Turritopsis dohrnii, has navigated the shifting surfaces and cataclysms of our planet, persevering through a regenerative strategy, and giving it the name, Immortal Jellyfish.
The immortal jellyfish is able to survive life-threatening attacks and injuries by restarting its lifecycle.
As the dying jellyfish settles to the ocean floor, their cells create new growth:
Polyp babies that grow in a stack, until they reach their medusa stage and return to swim in open water.
However, eternal life is not always to cheat death.
The White Cliffs of Dover were formed by countless generations of microscopic sea life slowly drifting down to rest their empty shell onto the ocean floor.
70 million years ago, this was a shallow sea. The tiny skeletons of single-cell organisms communally oozed downward condensing into a white mud, which later built the grandeur of the white cliffs over millennia. The dead are living forever in the faces of the cliffs.
When life feels too much, I wish I could soften and drift to safety at the bottom of the sea like the immortal jellyfish.
Down in the depths, released from my thoughts, I’d find a hiding place to germinate. I’d meet my quiet self, my shyest thoughts, hidden in a forgotten place. Like the immortal jellyfish, my body would quietly tend to itself, always regenerating to sustain me and to carry me back up towards the surface.
Author: Ariel Wills

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