Oriana Poindexter is a professional artist whose work weaves together photography, science, and marine life. She uses seaweed and light-sensitive chemicals to make stunning, almost haunting prints.
Oriana Poindexter is a professional artist whose work weaves together photography, science, and marine life. Her art is very unique. Oriana uses seaweed and light-sensitive chemicals to make stunning, almost haunting prints. She lives in San Diego where she free dives in kelp forests for inspiration, and to harvest materials for her art.
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Oriana Poindexter:
As a photographer, you're always paying a lot of attention to light and the quality of light and where light's falling. I've never found a more interesting scenario for light than in the kelp forest, just because it's being filtered through the canopy of the kelp, it's being filtered through the water, which changes on a daily basis, the visibility, the color, the clarity, and it's incredible.
Shelby Stanger:
Oriana Poindexter is a professional artist whose work weaves together photography, science, and marine life. Her art is very unique. Oriana uses seaweed and light-sensitive chemicals to make stunning, almost haunting prints. She lives in San Diego where she free dives in kelp forests for inspiration, and to harvest materials for her art.
Before she became an artist, Oriana was on a more traditional career path. She majored in photography and went to graduate school for marine biology. Eventually, Oriana was able to marry her passion for art and science into the lifestyle and art career of her dreams.
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living. An REI Co-op Studios production brought to you by Capital One. Oriana Poindexter has felt a pull to the ocean since childhood. She grew up in Laguna Beach where she spent countless afternoons playing on the beach with her family, building sand castles and exploring tide pools. She was a competitive swimmer in high school, and always felt comfortable in the water. When Oriana left home, she never forgot about her connection with the sea. Oriana Poindexter, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Oriana Poindexter:
Thanks for having me, Shelby.
Shelby Stanger:
Excited to have an in-person interview. You are a marine scientist who quit your job to be an artist and within a year, you've already been in the Smithsonian, you have an exhibit next week at UCSD. How did you develop your love of the ocean, which is what your art is centered around?
Oriana Poindexter:
I was lucky enough to grow up in Laguna Beach. I had parents that really loved taking my sister and I to the beach as kids, so some of my earliest memories are playing in the sea, playing in the tide pools, was really obsessed with sea anemones as a child.
Shelby Stanger:
That's so funny. Every kid is obsessed with sea anemones.
Oriana Poindexter:
Yeah, they're really cool. They're so colorful, they're so bizarre, so alien. But yeah, growing up I didn't have the conception that one could build their life around the ocean. I didn't have any adults in my life that were professionals working with the ocean in any way. So it took a while to figure that one out.
Shelby Stanger:
How did you get from not knowing to saying, yeah, I'm going to study marine science?
Oriana Poindexter:
I went to college on the East Coast at Princeton, and there was not really a marine biology program there. I did take the only marine bio classes they offered, and I actually graduated from my undergrad with a degree in photography. So I studied arts first, but there I was really removed from the ocean, obviously in central New Jersey, it's a little tough to get to the water. So when I moved back to California, I wanted to, I thought I was just going to be an artist right off the bat, and I didn't have any idea how that actually worked. Somebody told me about Scripps.
Shelby Stanger:
Scripps Institute of Oceanography.
Oriana Poindexter:
Yeah, Scripps Institution of Oceanography down at UC San Diego is this incredible institution where you can study the ocean and atmosphere in all of its different manifestations. A friend of mine told me that Scripps had these incredible marine collections where they have literally millions of specimens and jars out of the ocean, and I was obsessed with that idea, and I drove down here from Orange County and was just like, what do I have to do to be here? What do I have to do to hang out with all these jars? So I ended up coming down to Scripps and not with the intention of studying, really just because I was really interested in what was here. And then I quickly realized that like, oh, I need to go to grad school.
Shelby Stanger:
After visiting the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, Oriana's passion for marine life grew. She had recently started surfing and scuba diving, which sparked her curiosity about ocean ecosystems. She applied to the graduate program at Scripps and was accepted. After finishing her master's Oriana got a job at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. She hoped the job would involve fieldwork outside and in the water, but in reality, Oriana found herself sitting at a desk most of the time. She longed to spend more time in the ocean.
Outside of work, Oriana started freediving with some friends. Underwater, she fell in love with the way her body moved, especially without scuba equipment. She loved the soothing sounds she heard and the wide range of plants and animals she saw as she swam deeper and deeper. Most people are fascinated by fish or coral, but you're fascinated with seaweed and kelp, which to me is really a wild idea because as a surfer, I don't like kelp, it gets caught around your leash.
Oriana Poindexter:
Very annoying, yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
It's hard to swim through as an open ocean swimmer. It's like itchy, but it is absolutely beautiful when you swim on top of it. So talk to me about how you developed this love of kelp and seaweed.
Oriana Poindexter:
Well, I started freediving and spearfishing because that's what I thought people did when they freedived, and then I kind of lost interest in that relatively quickly, and was much more interested in photographing when I was freediving. And out here, the coolest place is to freedive are in the kelp forests, and they're relatively accessible from shore in certain areas of San Diego, and you can swim out into this underwater forest.
It's this three-dimensional habitat that goes from the bottom of the ocean to the surface, and there's fish swimming in the middle of the water column, at the bottom of the water column through this forest. So it creates a habitat for all of these hundreds of marine species. It's just the most interesting place to be when you're in the ocean. If you're photographing, if you're spearfishing, if you're just wanting to see a lot of life, the kelp forest is where you want to go. I started photographing a lot underwater in these spaces, all while working my desk job, and getting more and more interested, and trying to figure out how to make that more of my life.
Shelby Stanger:
So it's really interesting you said kelp forest. I've never thought of it as a forest. I get that it's called a kelp forest. But I mean, for people imagining who maybe they don't spend a lot of time underwater, it's very similar in some ways.
Oriana Poindexter:
It's super similar to a forest. It's actually, that picture that you have on the wall over there of the light streaming through the trees in the forest. It's that, but you can fly up and down from the bottom of the tree to the top of the tree.
Shelby Stanger:
And the trees aren't trees, they're just kelp.
Oriana Poindexter:
And the trees are kelp. And the light, as a photographer you're always paying a lot of attention to light and the quality of light and where light's falling. And in the kelp forest it's, I've never found a more interesting scenario for light than in the kelp forest, just because it's being filtered through the canopy of the kelp, it's being filtered through the water, which changes on a daily basis the visibility, the color, the clarity, and it's incredible.
Shelby Stanger:
Sounds amazing. Okay, so did you just start taking pictures of the kelp?
Oriana Poindexter:
Yeah, I started photographing just my friends that I was diving with in the kelp, around the kelp, I started photographing fish. I just kept diving in the same places, photographing over and over again, and every once in a while when the water was super clear, I'd get pictures that I was really excited about. But on a whole, when the visibility's not great, you just are not going to get a photograph that communicates what I wanted to communicate about that space, which is the awe that you feel underwater, and the way that it makes you feel small in a way that makes you respect the place that you're in. I don't know if that makes sense.
Shelby Stanger:
I mean, I write a lot about awe. I think it's like the most amazing emotion. You feel small and connected to others the same time. And yeah, it's an underwater, I think what you said, like this underwater forest with crazy lights. And the trees aren't green, they're like an orange-
Oriana Poindexter:
Like an amber, translucent gold when the color's right.
Shelby Stanger:
Love that. Oriana's photographs of ocean life are almost extraterrestrial. Fish peek through cloudy kelp forests, seals swim by in a blur of movement, and stingrays glisten in shallow waters. Oriana also takes beautiful pictures of kelp and seaweed, but most of her work these days isn't just traditional photography, or at least not in the way we think of it. Her primary medium is called a cyanotype, which is a kind of print that uses chemicals and sunlight to create a ghostly negative. What's cool about cyanotypes is that you don't need a camera to make them. Oriana's work shows white silhouettes of seaweed and kelp blades on a deep blue background. So this is a podcast, and obviously we can't show our listeners pictures of your art. Can you describe it and tell us how you make it?
Oriana Poindexter:
Yeah, so the artwork that I do primarily now is called cyanotype, which is a very early form of photography. It's actually one of the very first ways that they figured out in the 1840s how to create an image using chemistry and light. It's sort of alchemy. It's an emulsion made of two iron salts that when you combine them, they become sensitive to sunlight. And you can coat a piece of paper with these chemicals, you can lay any object on top of the paper, put it in the sun, wash it in water, and you have an image. And I'd always known about this process because I studied the history of photography, but I didn't really connect with it. I was like, why would I want a blue picture?
Shelby Stanger:
Why is it blue?
Oriana Poindexter:
That's just the color that those chemicals produce. These two iron salts make this color called Prussian blue. I started playing around with cyanotype in 2018, I took a workshop at a local gallery in Oceanside, and they taught you how to do this with the transparency of an image that you had taken, and you made a blue picture. And I was like, yeah, okay. Well, it's an underwater picture now it's all blue. And I just kind of set it aside and forgot about it.
And then about six months later, I came across online the work of Anna Atkins, who was a British botanist in the 1840s, and she was one of the first people to use this cyanotype process, and she also created the first book of photographs in the world ever. And that book of photographs is cyanotypes of seaweed.
Shelby Stanger:
That's crazy.
Oriana Poindexter:
So this is not new. What I'm doing is not new. Anna Atkins in the 1840s was a Victorian woman wearing ridiculous skirts and no diving. And I thought, well, there's this beautiful kelp that I've been struggling to photograph in a way that feels like it's doing it justice. I could try pulling it out of the water and printing it in this way. So once I started doing that, it just snowballed into, now I'm doing 15-foot long, 18-foot long life-size giant kelp prints.
Shelby Stanger:
So how do you do that? So first you got to dive for the seaweed. Tell me your whole process from start to finish.
Oriana Poindexter:
Yeah, so first I actually have to paint my paper. I have to prepare the paper, I make it all by hand. I buy watercolor paper and then I mix the chemicals. I buy them in bulk, and this all has to happen at night because they're sensitive to sunlight, to UV light. And then the next day I can get in the water and I know what my canvas is going to be. I know I have six pieces of paper that are 11 by 15 or whatever, and I go out and I kind of see what the ocean has for me that day. Some days I find what I thought I was looking for, and other days I find completely different things.
Shelby Stanger:
So you get these 100 feet-
Oriana Poindexter:
Not quite, I don't take the whole thing. Yeah. I only take as much as I plan to use. I never take a whole organism, that way that can keep growing. And then I come back to shore and then I go to my home studio and compose the images with the seaweed over the paper and then drag them out into the sunlight where they expose for about 10 minutes in the sunlight, and then I wash the paper and water, and then you have an image.
Shelby Stanger:
That's so interesting. If you see Oriana's pictures, they're these beautiful blue and white photos, and you can see the imprint of the seaweed in this blue color or in the white color.
Oriana Poindexter:
Yeah, it's in the white. So the background's blue, whatever's fully exposed by the sun and not covered by the seaweed is the dark blue, and what's covered up by the seaweed is the lighter white, light blue tone.
Shelby Stanger:
I thought you just took blue paint and painted over it.
Oriana Poindexter:
A lot of people think that. That is the assumption most of the time.
Shelby Stanger:
That is so cool. Okay, and so the first time you did it, were you like, this looks cool?
Oriana Poindexter:
Yeah, I got hooked pretty immediately. Well, after I had the epiphany that I could do it with seaweed and then it clicked that like, oh, I can get out of this little dark room that I had built in the closet of my studio, and I could be making handmade photographic prints outside at whatever size I could imagine, because all I needed was paper and sun and water and seaweed. And the seaweed comes really big, and so I just needed to find space to do it, and really big paper or fabric. And it kind of opened up this whole new world of possibilities of how I could be making artwork.
Shelby Stanger:
What was that day like when it all came together?
Oriana Poindexter:
I don't recall a specific day. It just kind of built on itself that I started just doing more and more and more and realizing like, oh, I can get a whole roll of paper that's 15 feet long. I can buy that. Wow, I didn't know that.
Shelby Stanger:
How did you know that this was something worth pursuing?
Oriana Poindexter:
I get lots of crazy ideas that I get really excited about, but they don't always excite other people. And so when these cyanotypes started connecting with people, that obviously made it more feasible for me to imagine that I could keep doing this and expand it and pursue further. But for me, it's infinite. The biggest print I've made is 18 feet long, and there's 150 feet of kelp out there. I have a long ways to go.
Shelby Stanger:
In 2021, Oriana was able to leave her day job to pursue art full time. Since then, she's had massive success. Her prints have been licensed by an outdoor gear company, Voided. She was written up in the Smithsonian magazine, and she has exhibited work all over San Diego, including at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps where she got her degree. When we come back, Oriana talks more about her new career as an artist, and how her art has connected her to nature.
Oriana Poindexter is an underwater photographer. She collects kelp and seaweed to make cyanotypes an old school type of photography that uses chemicals and sunlight to create a print without a camera. This medium portrays details that Oriana loves about the ocean, and it turns out that her work resonates with other people too. In 2021, Oriana was able to quit her job as a marine scientist and pursue art full time. What do you love best about this new career?
Oriana Poindexter:
That I can get in the ocean whenever I feel like it usually, not today.
Shelby Stanger:
What are the biggest challenges?
Oriana Poindexter:
The business aspect of it is really challenging. I just kind of pretend I know what I'm doing, and hope it connects.
Shelby Stanger:
That's kind of how all artists are.
Oriana Poindexter:
Yeah, I think I've just kind of pulled the feeling that I need to be spending a lot of time and effort on all aspects of this from previous jobs, and really from the world of academia. People work really hard and the way they're compensated is not necessarily in line with the amount of effort that they put in, but it's the good ones, they're so obsessed with what they do, that they just devote. It's not a 9:00 to 5:00, it's a 6:00 A.M. to 11 P.M. kind of work that they do. And working in that environment for a long time, I just assume that's how you... If you want to make something you love work, that's the kind of effort that you need to be putting in. And whether that involves from 6:00 to 9:00 AM you're in the ocean, and then you come home and you're printing or you're making artwork for six hours, and then you have to do the business end of things.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, I think that's a really important point, I think, to make art and make it work, you're not just going surfing and scuba diving and free diving and then printing some pictures. You're pretty full-on right now.
Oriana Poindexter:
Yeah, it's a lot of work on the back end that doesn't get seen, that doesn't get... And a lot of that work doesn't pan out. I send so many emails that are never responded to pitching ideas in a million places, and one or two of them gets picked up, and then that's amazing. But there are so many emails that just nobody replies to.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, I think a lot of wild ideas when you're chasing a wild idea as a career is pitching. And pitching is like dating. Sometimes it's just timing, and you have to just keep getting out there. What opportunities have come from pursuing this?
Oriana Poindexter:
Since I started making these seaweed cyanotypes, I had almost instantly this vision of wanting to make a whole forest of life-size kelp prints on fabric using this cyanotype process. And I just started saying it.
Shelby Stanger:
To yourself or out loud or in your head?
Oriana Poindexter:
First to myself, and then to my boyfriend, and then out loud to other people. And then I wrote this proposal that didn't even include the forest part, and I sent this proposal to 15 places in San Diego. And I didn't even send it to the Birch Aquarium, I ran into one of their exhibits team and I was like, "Hey, I have this proposal. I want to do a kelp show, but you guys probably can't do it because an aquarium and you have all this other cool stuff." And he was like, "Actually, we have the potential to put a short-term exhibit up," which for them is a six-month exhibit. "So send us a proposal."
And in my first meeting with their new exhibits director, we just hit it off, which never happens. And as soon as I said, "Oh, I can make these on fabrics and we can hang them vertically, and I've always wanted to make a forest." She just instantly understood what I wanted to do and what I had in my mind. And so the proposal kind of went by the wayside, but we made a forest.
Shelby Stanger:
Oriana and the Birch Aquarium at Scripps teamed up to create an exhibit called Hold Fast, a new way to experience kelp. Instead of her usual two-dimensional prints on paper, Oriana transferred her prints to long pieces of silk that were then hung from the ceiling. Because the silk moves gently as people walk through, it's reminiscent of being in a kelp forest underwater. This exhibit was a dream come true for Oriana. It's given her a chance to share what she loves about kelp with the public. I'm really curious how your art has connected you to nature, but so many others to nature.
Oriana Poindexter:
Yeah. I mean, it sort of came out of the desire to just be in the water and figure out a way to do that that felt productive and important. And the fact that I can produce something out of my experience in nature that will make somebody stop and kind of view nature differently, or rethink their perception of that environment is the really rewarding part. And that's the part that some people see as kind of educational, and I don't want to beat anybody over the head with a science book, but it lets you into this world in a way that isn't didactic or that doesn't feel unapproachable.
Shelby Stanger:
Doesn't feel like a classroom.
Oriana Poindexter:
Yeah. Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
It's really cool.
Oriana Poindexter:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
What do you hope people get from your art?
Oriana Poindexter:
I want them to get excited about the ocean and just kind of stop in their tracks and be like, I thought seaweed was this gross, stinky pile of stuff that gets in my way on the beach. But in fact, when it's alive and doing its thing, it's this incredibly beautiful organism. And then that it's this portal into understanding the environment.
Shelby Stanger:
In Oriana's art, you can feel both the vastness of the ocean, but also notice the texture and geometry of a piece of seaweed. It makes you feel big and small at the same time. If you have a chance to see Oriana's work in person, you absolutely should. Her kelp forest is on display at the Birch Aquarium in San Diego until Labor Day of 2024. And of course, you can also see her work and follow her latest adventures on Instagram at Opoindex. That's O-P-O-I-N-D-E-X.
If you liked this episode with Oriana and you want to learn more about the deep ocean, check out our interview with Susan Casey. She talks about the experience of taking a submersible down to the ocean floor. You'll also like our episode with artists and free diver BJ Griffin. We'll put the links in our show notes. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola, and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show. Take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.