Nudibranch mural at the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk
Max Coleman's fabulous 15'x 26' slug mural, now featured on the loading door of the aquarium in conjunction with the nudibranch exhibit inside.
Gar Waterman
EmailA Slug's Life at the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, CT
This is the prototype of my nudibranch inspired art/science exhibit, on display here in Connecticut at the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, which remains open during these difficult times. If you're looking for a little relief from Covid sequestration, put on your M-95, get on I-95, and come slug it out. The aquarium has lots of great marine creatures to look at, but you will not see many actual live sea slugs. An important takeaway from this exhibit is the fact that the vast majority of nudibranchs cannot be removed from their natural habitats without killing them, so the handful of live slugs that are on display represent some of the very few species that can be successfully kept in an aquarium environment.
It's a great show, there are some fabulous photographs by an international crew of slug shooters and, of course, there is sculpture from the world's greatest (and only, as far as I know) stone sea slug sculptor. No easy feat to make a claim like that on a planet of 7 billion plus people, but I'll bet my rhinophores on it.
A Pattern Language
My show at KLG Gallery in February of 2020 will feature sculpture assembled from foundry patterns. The Bigelow Boiler Company was a major New Haven industry for over a century, and many of these beautifully made wood patterns for casting in iron came from the National Pipe Bending Co., a Bigelow subsidiary. I rescued these from an attic of the old factory building over in Fair Haven not long before it was finally torn down, and I am very pleased to be able to give them another life.
Biggest beetle yet!
At 43" long, this is the largest beetle sculpture I have created to date. Like the Japanese I am somewhat obsessed with stag beetles - maybe something about the extraordinary configurations of their outsized mandibles. Assemble from myriad pieces of scrap steel, this sculpture required hundreds of hours of welding and grinding - a dirty job, but someone has to do it.
