Saving Coral Reefs | Interview With Courtney Mattison

Courtney Mattison is an American artist and marine activist working with ceramics to raise awareness about coral reefs and climate change. Using clay as her medium, Courtney Mattison creates intricate ceramic sculptures on a large scale. These pieces are informed by her background in ocean conservation science and policy. You can find Courtney’s pieces all over the world, from Indonesia to California.

Courtney Mattison is an American artist and marine activist working with ceramics to raise awareness about coral reefs and climate change. Using clay as her medium, Courtney Mattison creates intricate ceramic sculptures on a large scale. These pieces are informed by her background in ocean conservation science and policy. You can find Courtney’s pieces all over the world, from Indonesia to California.

What is the state of coral reefs at the moment and why do they need help? 

Coral reefs are extremely important to the health of the ocean and they’re also extremely sensitive to changes. And for that reason, with climate change and more extreme temperature changes and weather events, coral reefs are increasingly threatened. A lot of marine scientists have stated that they don’t expect coral reefs to be a functioning ecosystem by the end of this century, which is really scary.

Is this a big topic of conversation where you’re based in San Francisco?

Yeah, definitely. I think climate change in general is something that people in the coastal cities of the US are really focused on. America is famous for having sceptics about climate change, but here in San Francisco, it’s much more progressive and a lot of the people here believe in science and understand what’s going on in the world. It’s something that I hear a lot of people talk about and people are extremely mindful of their impacts on the environment and their ways of influencing corporations and governments to turn things around with climate change. 

I focus on this because climate change really is the biggest threat to coral reefs. I think there are other major threats like overfishing, commercial fishing, pollution and things like that. But climate change is what’s really devastating reefs around the world, way more quickly than anyone expected, because they are so sensitive to those temperature changes. Also, carbon dioxide dissolves into the seawater which makes it more acidic. So it’s a double whammy, dissolving them and suffocating them at the same time.

And has your art always been on coral reefs or climate change? 

It’s kind of my muse. I grew up in San Francisco and we don’t have tropical coral reefs right off the coast here, but I was always really fascinated with the sea and I started exploring tide pools and studying marine biology as a teenager.

As soon as I really dove in and became fascinated with marine life, I wanted to sculpt them. I felt like it was a way for me to connect with corals differently, and to understand the anatomy and structures of these creatures. Corals are animals, but they don’t have faces and they’re colonial and there are just so many weird aspects to marine invertebrates that I find fascinating. So to me, they seem really sculptural and it’s always been a natural way for me to celebrate and explore them. 

Was there a light bulb moment where you decided this was what you were going to do with your life? 

Yeah, I trained in marine science and art, so I was straddling these two disparate fields for most of my education. My formal education mostly focused on marine biology so I did think about becoming a marine scientist, but then I realised that if I was strictly a scientist, I would be throwing away a lot of this passion and the skills that I had developed in sculpture. I would also be throwing away my voice because scientists have to remain so neutral to collect data and publish studies.

I didn’t feel like I would have enough of an outward-facing voice to advocate for conservation. So that’s why I became an artist professionally. And now I work full time as an artist and I use that background in science to inform my work.

Can you tell me more about how your background in marine biology informs the work and how it influences what you do? 

I studied marine ecology and I focused on coral reefs. I did fieldwork in Australia on the Great Barrier Reef, and I’ve been scuba diving since I was 18. So I’ve been really lucky to go around the world to different tropical marine regions and other places and to see some of the healthiest coral reefs that we still have on our planet. And there are still some really healthy coral reefs that are possible to protect and worth saving. So all of that knowledge, both from the ecology side, the taxonomy side, but also the environmental kind of conservation world, that all informs my work.

I really want the people who see my work to fall in love with coral animals the way that I did because that’s what inspired me to want to act to protect them. So I really hope that my work can bring that alien exotic beauty above the surface for people to appreciate, even if they’re not able to put their faces underwater themselves. 

So is that the aim of your work? What reactions are you trying to inspire? 

I try to encourage people to protect the corals in a gentle and personal way. We protect what we love, and we love what we know and understand and feel familiar with.

The ocean is a dark, mysterious and scary place for a lot of people. I want to help people understand it in a different way and I think art has an immense power to shape how we understand the world. By portraying these coral reef ecosystems in kind of fantastical, colourful, beautiful ways, I try to celebrate them and invoke emotions and individuality so that people might become more curious. I think it has to be a really personal exploration because that’s the only way we’re going to feel truly motivated to make long-lasting change.

What’s the process behind your creations? 

A lot of my work uses similar themes. Because coral reefs bleach white, I think that’s a really stark way to visualise climate change. So that’s a theme that I explore in a lot of my work. Corals are not necessarily as colourful as what you see in my work. But I like taking an artistic licence and not being completely realistic because it’s more about evoking that sense of wonder. 

When I come up with my designs, a lot of them are swirly and evoke ideas of weather patterns or just changing places. The swirling forms are kind of anti-gravity, elevating the reef off the seafloor and putting it into space where its fate is up in the air. So conceptually, to me, the fate of coral reefs is in our hands, and we get to decide if they’re doomed or not. I think having work that swirls from colourful to bleached or maybe the other way around is up to interpretation for a lot of people. 

In terms of my actual sculpting process, when I come up with a design like that,  it looks very freeform, but it’s actually extremely meticulously planned out. I know where every single piece of hardware is going to go on the wall before I start building a single piece. So I map everything out first on the computer and then I create a full-scale map on the floor of my studio. I build each piece in relation to each other, so it’s really like a big three-dimensional puzzle. So it’s really meticulous, takes tons of planning and sometimes the installations that I do are many metres high or require a lot of logistical strategies to install them.

How does it change depending on the place where you’re going to show it or the exhibition? 

I do a lot of site-specific work that is commissioned for permanent installation and integrated into the architecture of an office building or a hotel or something like that. I like working really big because I think that gets people’s attention and it brings up this idea of one small person creating something really enormous which is a metaphor for the impact that one person can have. So I do try to focus on really large-scale stuff. But I also do some residential commissions.

I also show in museums around the world and things like that. It’s fun to do site-specific stuff because I can kind of integrate it into the architecture and respond to how the light moves through a space.

Do you get to see the way that people react to it? Have you had a response that really stood out to you and touched you? 

Sometimes I’ll go into a place where my work is installed and just pretend I don’t know what I’m doing there. But I don’t get to do that very often. There have been a couple of times when I’ve seen someone have a really emotional response, and maybe tear up. That has been really important to me as motivation to keep going.

You see a lot of cynical stuff when you’re in a museum show. You sort of overhear comments and you don’t know if it’s actually getting through to people. But seeing little glimmers like that is really, really lovely.

Do you find it difficult to stay positive?

Yeah, definitely. I’m not naive and I understand the science behind all of it so it is really hard to stay positive sometimes because things really aren’t looking good for coral reefs. They’re not going to disappear altogether because certain coral species are resilient and they’re going to persist like weeds in a garden. But the beauty and the value of the coral reef come from diversity and redundant species that help each other out or compete with one another in important ways. So if a number of those species go extinct or disappear in certain areas, they just won’t function in the same way. So it is really hard to know what’s happening.

I think the way that I stay positive is through interacting with people who are moved by the work and are using that to do their own things that can help. But also by visiting reefs that are still really healthy. I try to get back in the water at least once a year and see a healthy coral reef because they are still out there.

Why do you choose to show coral reefs through clay? 

It started out as a medium that was available to me. I had used clay before and there was a ceramic studio at my high school. But once I started working with it and really learned what reef-building coral does, I realised that calcium carbonate is what corals essentially sculpt their skeletons out of. That’s a material that’s limestone essentially, and that is really common in glaze materials so there’s sort of a chemical parallel between my work and real corals.

There’s also this sense of fragility that is really undeniable. So conceptually that sense of fragility is really important in my work. But you can imagine that porcelain and anemone tentacles are extremely fragile. Making something with clay is so difficult, it takes a lot of patience and troubleshooting. Ceramic is not a friendly material at first, because everything is so fragile. But if you handle everything properly and you protect it at certain stages of the production process, it’s actually pretty resilient. 

What’s the most difficult thing in the physical design process? 

I think there are certain challenges that are related to working with design-build teams. When I’m doing a big project for an office building in an earthquake country, for example, there is a risk with installing the work. I’ve had some really interesting experiences working with engineers and architects to fine-tune the attachment methods that I use and really make sure that my work is going on the wall securely in a way that’s not going to kill somebody. Packing and shipping artwork like this is also really challenging because it’s so fragile. I work with professional art handlers to pack all my work now.

Have you had any projects that you’ve particularly enjoyed or that have touched you in a certain way? 

There are a couple of projects that I’ve done that are in Indonesia that are extremely meaningful. There’s also a project that I did for the Coral Triangle Centre in Bali that is a community project. So I didn’t sculpt everything myself, we actually worked with a team of around 200 volunteers, artisans and marine scientists and everybody got together and sculpted ceramic corals. We ended up installing about 2,000 of them on a wall in an installation that I designed for the Centre for Marine Conservation in Bali. So that was a really fun one. 

The other, the biggest work that is also in Indonesia is at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta. That was a commission that I created myself, and it’s absolutely enormous. It’s a big, swirling wall installation that is in the kind of atrium of the embassy building. And that one’s called Confluence, and it’s part of my Art Changing Seas series.

So you have exhibitions literally all over the world? 

Yeah, I just completed one in Capri in Italy. That one is a brand new one that I am hoping to be able to share photos of soon.

Can you tell me about the sustainability aspect of your work? 

Obviously, it’s coming from the environment and it’s a natural material. I try to be mindful of where my materials are sourced and I buy all my clay in the state of California. So it’s all made, you know, within the state. So it’s relatively local. I try to do the same with my glazes. I am very mindful of resource use in general. I think water and electricity are big resources that I have to think about because I have electric kilns in my studio and water is required for all kinds of steps of the fabrication process. So I try to limit resource use.

But, in terms of environmental impacts and climate change, there’s often an imperative put on individuals to focus on their own impacts, but that often distracts from the focus on big corporations and policymakers that really make the outsized impact on these environmental issues. A lot of the work I do is trying to remind people about the advocacy work that we can do to raise awareness and push for reforms on a bigger scale instead because it’s always the individual who gets the blame, not the massive companies.

If you could tell people what to do to help the situation what would you say? 

I think the biggest thing any of us can do is what we are uniquely skilled at. I got some really interesting advice when I was first starting out from an author and marine scientist named Carl Cicina. He said, do what you can uniquely do to make a difference, and I think that refers to the personal impact that I was talking about. Each of us has to feel personally inspired and motivated in our own way to do whatever it is. It could be advocacy, policy change, research, Marine science or social science. There are so many facets to the problem and to the solutions, and we need to come up with creative solutions in order to fight climate change and also reduce the other threats that are on coral reefs. So coming up with new ways to develop and promote renewable energy is a big one. 

I think there are so many exciting things that all need to happen at once. And so we need everyone to feel excited about doing their own part of that process.

And what do you think the situation will be in 10 years time? 

I think we’re going to see a lot more bleaching events. Every summer is the hottest summer on record now. But I also think there’s so much awareness growing really quickly among young people. So it makes me hopeful that there are a lot of young people who are becoming really passionate about demanding change.

I think technology is going to play a big part in it. I think we’re way more connected now than we used to be, and that’s only going to keep growing. And so I think it’s possible to hold people accountable in new ways, and I can only imagine where that’s going to go in the next 10 years. So I’m cautiously optimistic.