SAN DIEGO — A new art show in San Diego is reaching back in time to connect with an anonymous woman from the 1800s.
Inspiration can strike any time. For artist Ron Miriello, seeing a seaweed scrap book from 1876 stirred something in his soul.
“It’s God talking to you,” Miriello said.
The Victorian-era scrapbook of seaweed was discovered by a collector friend of Ron’s in Maine.
“I’ve been just playing with these beautiful nature images, which are frozen in time from 150 years ago from an unknown woman, who just happened to be a renegade of her time,” Miriello said. “And who selected these things by wandering out into the Atlantic in her petticoat?”
Over the past year, Miriello has created a collection of new works on canvas, textiles and lithographs. This show is called “Found Adrift | Timeless new works inspired by an 1876 seaweed scrapbook.”
Arie Hammond is the research library director at the San Diego Natural History Museum.
She said seaweed collecting or “sea weeding” was a popular hobby for Victorian women, as it gave them a way to explore nature and contribute to scientific knowledge, while still being a pastime acceptable in polite society.
“They were encouraged to stay home in their own backyards to catalog their own flowers. It was very genteel; but the women who went to collect algae were kind of breaking barriers by going out to the coast, trampling in through the seaweed and the shore and the waves, getting covered in sand,” Hammond said. “It’s really a labor of love because it’s a lot of work to go through, identify the specimens, clean them off, arrange them beautifully, press them.”
Hammond says historically, much of the labor behind natural history was done by women, but attributed to anonymous. The Nat has a few seaweed pressings in their collection that were created by two women named Mary Snyder and Mrs. G.A. Hall more than 100 years ago.
“It’s art and science together. You’re pressing the specimens, but they’ve arranged them in this artistic pattern,” Hammond said. “They were doing it in the 1850s and thought it was beautiful art and we’re doing it now in 2024 and see it’s beautiful art. I think that’s cool, too.”
Miriello hopes his artwork will celebrate the beauty of nature and how it weaves together with science, while celebrating the spirit of the women at the time.
“This has been probably seen by very few people until now. To me this is a little bit like time travel because she probably never saw this out of her own house. It got locked in a case, and now it’s found its way to us,” he said. “It’s really a celebration of her, but it’s also a celebration of nature and science and art and how those three things coalesce into the same journey.”
Sea weeding was a fashionable pastime for young women, and Queen Victoria even created her own seaweed album as a child.
"Found Adrift" will be on display in San Diego’s dynamic Barrio Logan Arts District. The exhibition will be available by appointment only until Feb. 1, 2025.
"Found Adrift" is presented in partnership with World Design Capital and will be exhibited in Paris and Rome in 2025.