Marine Artist Creates Seaweed Botanicals

NEWPORT, RI —Mary Chatowsky Jameson grew up in Rhode Island and spent hours at Third Beach with her Dad inspecting clams and squids and seaweed.

The seaweed, with its colors and textures and twists and turns, inspired her, and as she researched the history of seaweed in art, she discovered this type of marine art goes back to the Victorian era and has plenty of Newport connections.

Jameson is having a pop-up sale this weekend at her Newport Saltwater Studio, so people can go over and take a look.

"I call the seaweed pressings marine botanicals," she said and allowed she ultimately decided to use seaweed as an artistic medium.

"I'd seen Victorian era pressings" that "made me look twice," she said, so she went to the Newport Historical Society to find out more.

"There are some great Newport connections," she said. In the nineteenth century, summer visitors from Chicago and New York came to Newport and made scrapbooks to take home. The scrapbooks contained poetry and watercolors, and the Historical Society has acquired some of them.

"Nature-based art was in vogue," she said, but it also gave women of social standing a pretext to go unchaperoned to the beach or for a walk in the woods, she said.

These women had to obey society's rules; but as long as they were looking for the hand of God in Nature, she said, the social rules could be relaxed and the women could enjoy more freedom than usual.

According to a doctoral candidate, who had researched scrapbooks at the Historical Society, she said, some of these Victorian women sold their seaweed pressings. Some of the art also was sent to Boston to raise money for the Abolitionists.

Besides the window into history, seaweed appeals to Jameson for its colors, textures and shapes and the way the seaweed expresses the "ebb and flow" in Nature, as "different pieces are twisted and come together."

Two years ago, she had a show at the Newport Art Museum. In February, she'll exhibit at Olin College in Needham, Mass. And she's also been chosen to exhibit at the Green Space Gallery at T.F. Green Airport, Warwick.

Courtesy Photos Mary Chatowsky Jameson