Collection: Ocean

Ocean (born in California, 1978)

Ocean is a disabled poet, novelist, and visual artist living in the Pacific Northwest. His poetry, essays and fiction are known for their resuscitation of the mythic and their contribution to literary animism. His visual arts, informed by proto-language and asemia, have shown internationally.

Artist Statement

These text-based drawings are created by overlapping the same phrase again and again until the writing becomes illegible. They might be the textual representation of an echo: a non-dissipating echo, an echo which remains. Or they might allude to Semantic Satiation, the phenomenon in which a word or phrase loses its meaning when repeated ad nauseum. 

These pieces take many days to complete, inducing a trance-like state that overcomes me as my wrist articulates the same gesture for the thousandth time, the texture of nib against paper fiber as the pen strikes and zigzags and loops. Time flattens as the hours that seep into these works become manifest, a visual representation of time compressed into artifact. 

Asemic (non-semantic) writing transcends cultures and eras. Its history tracks back thousands of years to the Chinese calligraphers Zhang Xu and Huaisu, who painted illegible calligraphies, and later the Japanese calligraphers, often zen monks, who practiced spontaneous Hitsuzendō and Bokuseki, inking outside of language. But even further back we find primal mark-making that preceded writing. Graphism: dots, lines, rhythmic scratchings. Paleoanthropologists find traces of these proto-writings in southern Africa as far back as 70,000 years. And yet still further we swim upstream to much more ancient movements: those left by hooves dashing across a crumbling embankment, pawmarks stamped in the clay of an ancient shore, claw sharpenings in bark, scale undulations across sand, the hashmarks of crisscrossing skeletal remains and the watermarks in dry riverbeds: proto-languages writ accidentally on the canvases of the natural world. 

Inscribing paper like this, layer burying layer, the sheets become a form of “writing midden,” as in a heap of coastal oyster shells discarded over generations. These palimpsests agonize language into echolalia, their linguistic meaning washed away, leaving the immateriality of time emblazoned on the materiality of paper. Only the trace of the gesture moving through time remains. Staring at these pieces the eye gives up “trying to make sense,” abandoning the communicative function and drifting into realms of the illegible and unspeakable. 

SELECT EXHIBITIONS & PERFORMANCE
2025 Works on Paper 2025, Gallery at Green & Stone, London
2024 In Writing, Treat Gallery, New York
          Terral Aperture, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art Museum, South Korea
          Letting Go Is All We Have To Hold On To, Emerge Gallery, New York
          ( ((elapse)) ), Vestibule Gallery, Seattle
          Works on Paper, Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, New York
          Salt Crown / Time Capsule, Vestibule Gallery, Seattle
2023 The Village Scroll, Olympia Armory, Olympia
          Palimpsest Journal, Thurston County Museum of Fine Art, Olympia
2021 Dear Koi, Lan Su Chinese Garden, Portland
          Speculative Futures: Art, AI and Digital Worldmaking, The Holt Gallery, Portland
          Ekphrasis and Other Collaborations, Bar Francis, Olympia
2018 A Choir of Ghosts Refleshed, Circadia, Portland
2017 Psychopomp, Circadia, Portland
2012 Occultural Musick Festival, Seattle
2009 Oral Section, Sizizis, Olympia
2006 Salt, Parts Olympic, Cascadia
2003 Mixed Works, CARA Gallery, Seattle

AWARDS
2024 Longlisted, Granum Foundation Prize
          Finalist, Driftwood Press Adrift Short Story Contest
          Creative Access Award
2023 John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Sponsored Residency, Yaddo
          Whiting Foundation Grant
          PARC Foundation Arts Intervention Grant
2022 Prairie Fellowship
2018 Creative Access Fellowship
2017 Craig H. Neilson Foundation Fellowship
          Longlisted, Omnidawn Fabulist Fiction Chapbook Contest
2015 Creative Access Fellowship
2005 Jeanne Lohmann Poetry Award

RESIDENCIES
2025 Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland (forthcoming)
          Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico (forthcoming)
          Edward F. Albee Foundation Fellowship, Montauk, New York (forthcoming)
          Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Otis, Oregon
2024 PLAYA, Summer Lake, Oregon
2023 Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York
2022 Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico
          Ragdale, Lake Forest, Illinois
2018 Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California
          Ragdale, Lake Forest, Illinois
2017 PLAYA, Summer Lake, Oregon
2015 Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico

LECTURES
2022 Guest lecture, Dreamblur, Pacific Northwest College of Art
          Private fiction tutelage
2021 Guest writer, undergraduate creative writing, Portland State University
2018-19 Guest writer, undergraduate consciousness studies, The Evergreen State
College (novel Helios on the syllabus)

PUBLICATIONS:

BOOKS
2023 Soundcastles, novella
2019 The Dream Jar, children’s stories (audiobook 2021)
2015 Helios, novel
2006 Black Hills Cabal, poetry collection
2003 Jupiter’s Sorrows, chapbook

SHORT STORY
2025 “Pup” LoveAboards (forthcoming)
2024 “Pips” Occulum
2020 “Zeroeth World” (put to film with Chelsea Friedman)
2019 “Kryptonite” Breath & Shadow

POEMS
2025 “Fir Boards” and “Chocolate” Quotidian (forthcoming)
2024 “Come Great Wind” Woundscapes
2024 “Hold On” Magnets and Ladders
2024 “When I Say” The Globe Review
2024 “Kintsugi” Réapparition Journal
2024 “Dating an Able-Bodied Person” Wishbone
2024 “Walk” Corporeal
2023 “Asterion Deliriant” (reprint) Process & Place: Headlands at 40
2023 “1894” Medicine for a Nightmare
2021 “Asterion Deliriant” Samaritan Press
2021 “Ceremony of the Slain Bear” Samaritan Press
2021 “I Was Happy the Animals Came Back” Sheltered in Place
2021 “Ship of Ghosts” Memorie
2021 “Born” The Wilderness
2019 “Animal” Free State Review
2019 “Transformations III” Duende
2019 “Wheelchair” Monstering
2018 “Push” Intima
2018 “Coral” poem put to film, with Paul Sutfin
2017 “Northern Flicker” On the Edge
2014 “Dreamlife of the Styx” Cascadian Yule
2012 “Androgyne Primordial” Hex Magazine
2010 “Wheeling” Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment
2008 “Hollow Tree” Hex Magazine
2006 “Port of the Sun” Cascadian Yule
2005 “Rain” Fauna
2004 (Untitled) Mad Hatter’s Mercury

ESSAY
2024 “Beyond Meaning” Katabatik (forthcoming)
2024 “Against Relevance” Oak Journal
2021 “Hybrids” NoMaterialism
2020 “Ghosts of Stone” The Wilderness
2019 “Echoes” The Wilderness
2012-14 various music reviews: Vita Ignes Corpus Lignum
2010 “Rain” Hideous Gnosis

READINGS
2023 Flow: Art and Ecology Symposium, Kitteredge Gallery, Tacoma
2022 Hekate’s Crossing, Azoth, Portland
2022 Pallas Gallery, San Francisco
2022 Ragdale Dance Studio, Chicago
2021 Iran-America Artist Exchange, Along These Lines, Alberta Abbey Gallery, Portland
2021 Ceremony of the Slain Bear, An Evening in the Garden, The Lab, Olympia
2018 Open House Readings, Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco
2017 Push, Bowery Poetry Club, New York
2015 SFAI 140, Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe
2012 Asterion Deliriant, Cryptatropa, Olympia
2011 Port of the Sun, The Midnight Sun, Olympia
2010 Persophone Partaketh the Shade-Fruit, Hall of the Woods, Olympia
2009 As Heterocera Unto Sankta Lucia, Hall of the Woods, Olympia
2009 That the Sunlight May Penetrate Our Bones, Sizizis, Olympia
2007 Honey from the Dead King, Hall of the Woods, Olympia
2007 Dream Theater, Hall of the Woods, Olympia
2006 Earth is the River of Heaven, Manium, Olympia
2006 Unfolded Bird, Last Word Books, Olympia
2006 In the Beginningless Beginning, Last Word Books, Olympia
2005 Jupiter’s Sorrows and New Works, Orca Books, Olympia
2005 Mandorla, private showing, Olympi

EDUCATION
2022 MFA Creative Writing, Pacific Northwest College of Art
2023 Bachelor of the Liberal Arts, The Evergreen State CollegE