Marine ecologist Mehr Kumar and sculptor Mark Baugh-Sasaki come together in an unusual collaboration exploring the fragile ecosystem of the Southern Ocean. In this episode, they share how art and science can jointly imagine climate futures—and how a chance whale sighting deepened their creative connection.
Transcript: HERE
Featured Guest: Mehr Kumar & Mark Baugh-Sasaki
Sediment Core digital visualization: https://arts.stanford.edu/core-sample/
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Credits
Host: Ellen Oh
Creator/Producer/Editor: Taylor Jones
Production support: Edi Dai
Sound Designer and Mix Engineer: Chase Everett
Theme song and Music: Juana Izuzquiza
Executive Producers: Ellen Oh and Anne Shulock
Artwork: Connie Ko.
Special thanks to Deborah Cullinan.
Art & is supported by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in honor of Roberta Bowman Denning.
Hello and welcome to Art & – a new show from Stanford Arts.
On today’s episode, a sculptor and an oceans scientist work together on a new art project that dives into the detrimental impacts of human intervention in the Southern Ocean ecosystem.
Mehr Kumar: I think that if we cannot be optimistic in the face of climate action and climate change and climate just futures, we have no shot. And so for me, that's where art comes in.
Mark Baugh-Sasaki: I've been really thinking about what are the next steps that we take and how is that changing my artistic practice? How can art be part of the solution?
The Doerr School of Sustainability is our newest school, and a hub for cutting-edge climate research. It was founded with a bold vision: to create a future where people and nature thrive together.
When they reached out to explore what it could look like to bring in an artist for an exciting collaboration, I knew we had a real opportunity. That spark of a conversation is what grew into Third Space.
So, after going through a selection process, we landed on Mark Baugh-Sasaki as the collaborating artist. Mark has done a number of public art installations throughout California, and is currently working on a major commission for the Ocean Beach Climate Change Adaptation Project in San Francisco.
Mehr is an oceans researcher in Jeremy Goldbogen’s lab at the Hopkins Marine Station off the coast of Monterey Bay.
So with that, here’s our conversation with Mark and Mehr.
Mehr Kumar: Hi, my name's Mehr Kumar. I was a class of 2020 grad, and I am a marine ecologist and artist and an environmental justice advocate, and I work at Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey.rrrr
Mark: My name is Mark Baugh- Sasaki, and I'm an interdisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. My work deals with the relationships between humans and their surrounding environments. I received my MFA from Stanford in 2017.
Ellen Oh: Mehr, you’ve been working with a pretty cool interdisciplinary team on an Environmental Venture Project supported by the Woods Institute for the Environment. The goal is to understand what our historical ecosystem looked like before humans disrupted everything— hopefully so that we can better restore or protect it now. Can you tell us more about that work? What have you been focusing on?
Mehr Kumar: I have been working on this Woods Institute funded research project for a few years now, and this project takes place in the southern ocean, which is the ocean that wraps around the Antarctic. It's a really interesting place because if you think about… at the same latitude in the northern hemisphere as in the southern hemisphere, really different things are happening. So in the northern hemisphere, at the same latitude, you still have trees, but in the Antarctic you just have ice. There's no wood down there.
And this current is in some ways the cause of that. It causes different atmospheric and different oceanic systems that sequester a lot of things and make this a really, in some ways, like biologically lonely place. Things that happen in the Antarctic influence what happens in the rest of the ocean. The southern ocean also is extremely, extremely important, because of all of the carbon that humans emit, the southern ocean takes up 40% of it. So we have it to thank for a lot.
But the southern ocean's also a system that changed a ton, and it changed because of human engagement in it. Humans, within the course of 70 years in the 20th century, which is shorter at this point than a human lifespan, removed about a million animals, a million big whales. So in the Southern Ocean, in particular, pretty much everything eats krill. And when we removed all of the whales in the ecosystem, we expected that the krill population would go bananas. But that is not what happened.
The krill population also declined. And so the idea and the theory is that removing the whales as this sort of keystone species had a really huge cascading impact down the ecosystem. And the reason for that is because the southern ocean in particular, it's really deficient in this micronutrient iron. The input for iron in the southern ocean is just continent dust, but there's not a lot of continent in the southern ocean. But what's really high in iron is whale poop.
And so whales will eat krill and then they'll swim offshore, and then their feces will spread iron all around this ecosystem and that iron will allow phytoplankton to grow. And that's how we, Mark and I, came around to thinking a lot about iron in this piece, too. Is what does it mean for humans to have removed this like, really important part of… sense of balance in the ecosystem and how can humans be involved in bringing it back together?
Ellen Oh: That’s such a fascinating chain of events and a complex issue to take on. I’m curious at what point you thought bringing an artist into this work would be beneficial?
Mehr Kumar: I think I have been a very art and science both-focused person throughout my whole life. And I think they're both pretty similar, but often we don't get a chance to exercise that, that much in science.
Science has changed a lot in the last hundred or so years. It used to be a lot more art-focused in a lot of ways, right? Illustration used to be a really big part of the practice. Observation used to be a really big part of the practice. You can read papers from a hundred years ago that start with some guy talking about how he needed to, like, get childcare for his kids before he could come look at this whale on the beach. There was a lot more storytelling and things like that in science a while ago. And when Woods came to us to ask how should we communicate this work and this research, I wanted to think a little bit bigger and expand our forms of thinking and doing around this and not just think about, “Okay, how can we communicate this?” but how can we expand the research as a practice itself and reintroduce some of these things that we don't get to do very often.
Ellen Oh: Let’s talk about Mark! Why was he a good fit to collaborate on this project?
Mehr Kumar: Yeah, "Why Mark?" is a great question. This comes up also a lot in science... who you collaborate with almost matters more than the work that you do. And I think like from the beginning we could tell that we thought in very similar ways. Right? Like, for Mark, as someone who was interested in art and science growing up, and for me to be someone who's interested in art and science growing up, and for us both to have landed in opposite places, I think we had a sort of shared language of understanding already.
Ellen Oh: And Mark, what excited you when we came to you with this possibility?
Mark Baugh-Sasaki: For me it was my first opportunity to ever work directly in the sciences and not kind of on the periphery of like making work about science, and more about being able to actually talk with somebody in the field who's doing interesting work but also thinking about, like, “What does it mean?”
Ellen Oh: I think the way that you guys just started this relationship was like you hanging out with Mark's family.
Mehr Kumar: Yeah.
Mark Baugh-Sasaki: Finding collaborators is hard, particularly because finding somebody you gel with as well as personally as well as professionally is difficult. And I've actually never done it.
Mark Baugh-Sasaki: You took me through the world of your world at Hopkins and kind of introducing me, but not only to the people who work there and your research and the tools and equipment and the space, but also the larger space, right?
It's a place that excited me. I think more than anything, we spent a lot of time getting to know each other and build a relationship, I think. And that was, kind of, the most important step in what we've done.
Mehr Kumar: If you do science alone, you will be a very lonely and unsuccessful scientist. And that I think is pretty well understood, but that doesn't mean we're at all good at figuring out how to work well with each other or who needs to collaborate or who doesn't, or how to build those relationships.
What was really cool about first getting to know each other is whenever… when you do anything your “self” becomes a part of it. If you are going to paint or take a photo of something that you saw on a hike, you are going to see it through your own lens.
I wasn't showing Mark science, I was showing him what I thought was cool about science. And when he was showing me art, he was showing me what he resonated with in art. And so in that, you aren't just learning about science and art and these two different worlds, you're learning about this other person's lens and perspective on those worlds.
Mark Baugh-Sasaki: We also see those overlaps too, where we're like, oh, these are the things that both excite us and we're coming at them from these two different modalities, and I think that you're just like, well, that's very exciting to me.
Mehr Kumar: Yeah
Ellen Oh: So let’s dig into the art, because the goal of this project involved creating a new installation on campus, which became Third Space. Can you tell me more about how the work evolved during your time together?
Mehr Kumar: So this project is looking at a sediment core, which is a vertical sample of the seabed. So if you were to take a tube, basically a really long tube, and stick it down into the ocean floor and pull it back up, you'd get all these layers of sediment that depending on where you are in the world, can take you back tens of thousands of years if not more. And so this project is trying to ask the question: what did the ecosystem look like before humans were involved with it?
Mark Baugh-Sasaki: Well, there's two artworks, basically. There's an artwork that was created as a window graphic that uses the double exposure photographs that worked for us from Hopkins, from Hopkins and Sylmar, kind of creating our own geology and kind of our own core that go up the side of the building, kind of like as a representation of both our combined perceptions of place as a way of thinking or thinking about our collective perception of our environment, both physical and imagined.
The sculptural work installation is four elements of these cylinders filled with iron filings that as you rotate them, the iron filings kind of cascade down through the water column, and people are encouraged to rotate them at 180 degrees to let them continue those processes of settling, and as the work is interacted with, it's filled with ocean water, which is causing the iron to oxidize. It's creating a tool to record human intervention with the artwork, but also thinking about it as a metaphor for how we interact with our environment and the marks that we leave on the landscape.
Mehr Kumar: Yeah, so to your point about how do you distill longitudinal potentially decades, lifelong, whatever… collaboration into an outcome that needs to happen within nine months? I think that the way you do that is you don't think about making a thing, you think about what is the thing that we've learned together right now, and how do you put that in a way that other people can respond to it?
Ellen Oh: So as you have put this artwork out into the world, do you think it inspires people to act or feel or care more about the issue? What impact did you hope the work would have?
Mehr Kumar: I think about this a lot, especially as a young person, a young scientist: “Why science? Why are we doing what we're doing?” And I think that if we cannot be optimistic in the face of climate action and climate change and climate just futures, we have no shot, absolutely no shot. And so for me, that's where art comes in. I hope that it will inspire, but that's not something that I have control over.
We can look at the present, we can project into the future, but we're not imagining what's going on. We're not imagining what we want to happen. We're not thinking about, what do we want for ourselves, and then how do we get there. I think if you have context created by science, the art strength in that context that science is not often equipped to do is to be imaginative and to think about what do we want this to look like and how do we get there? It can help me expand this field that I care about and I love a lot, but also can recognize that science has places that it could use some help, and it can use some help from art.
Mark Baugh-Sasaki: In my practice, you know there's often the sense of “art doesn't do anything” per se, like an actionable item. For me, it's been really thinking about the urgency of the situation surrounding climate change. Like, “what can art do?” And thinking about art and ecosystem restoration as an artistic practice. For me, I've been really thinking about what are the next steps that we take and how is that changing my artistic practice? And thinking about both doing something, like physical, or how can art be part of the solution.
Ellen Oh: I heard that there was a whale sighting during your visit. Can you tell me about that?
Mehr Kumar: Mark was coming down to Hopkins and I was going to show him some of the station and some of the science that we do and introduce him to some of our lab members. And then I got a phone call from Mark.
Mark Baugh-Sasaki: Yeah, so I was coming down for a week. It was our first time that I was spending a whole week down there to be at Hopkins and kind of just see what that was all about. The next morning I woke up – if you look, there's just right on the bay, it was seal pupping season. So there were a bunch of seals out and-
Mehr Kumar: Fresh seals.
Mark: Fresh seals, yes. It was beautiful. So I had my breakfast out there, and then Mehr I were supposed to meet up, or as I was going to meet up, I was kind of texting her saying like, “Oh yeah, you know I'm outside. Hey, how do I get into the building?” And as I was looking out over the bay, a whale swam by and it was pretty, I was just like, “Hey!” And so I texted her, I was like, ‘There's a whale.’ And you were like, “What do you mean?”
Mehr Kumar: Well, yeah. So people cry “whale” a lot at Hopkins because there's a lot of whales in Monterey. And one of my goals as a researcher there has always been to never not be amazed when there's a whale. It happens so frequently that you'll get a text or an email, and nobody goes out there to look because everyone’s so wrapped up in their own work and their analysis. And I never want that to be normal for me.
So when Mark was like, there's a whale, I was like, “Yeah, okay, I'm coming,” obviously. And I get down there and there's a whale very close to shore, extremely close, much closer than I've ever seen it, to a point that I was a little concerned, cause it is shallow where this whale was. It being that shallow immediately said to me, oh, okay. I think this must be a whale that I've never seen before. A gray whale.
Its migration path is from Baja all the way up to Seattle. And it stops a bunch along the way, including in Monterey. So I was like, oh, I need to go see this gray whale. And then I texted some of the folks in my lab to come down too and come see this whale, especially because it's a gray whale. And that was exciting. It was a really good moment for me to realize there's a way that I want to interact with science and there's a way that I know I don't want to interact with science. And I think awe and imagination, which I think has been especially important in our collaboration and is really important in art. That's the way I want to interact with science.
Ellen Oh: Well that seems like a beautiful place to end. Thank you both so much for being here today and for this conversation.
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If you’re on campus, or live in the bay area, you can see the exhibition of Mark and Mehr’s work at Y2E2 through June.
Check out our show notes for a link to a digital visualization of Mark & Mehr’s research process.
From Stanford Arts, this is Art &.
Ellen Oh is our host. The show is produced and edited by me, Taylor Jones.
Edi Dai is our production assistant.
Chase Everett is our sound designer and mixing engineer. Our theme song and music is composed by Juana Everett.
Series artwork is by Connie Ko.
Executive Producers are Anne Shulock and Ellen Oh.
Special thanks to Mehr Kumar, Mark Baugh-Sasaki, Deborah Cullinan, Stanford Vice President for the Arts, and Stanford Live.
Art & is recorded at Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University.