Description

Dreaming Corky at Home, Hanson Island

In the cold, bright waters off Hanson Island, the A5 pod still travels the kelp-lined channels of the Johnstone Strait, rubbing on the smooth pebble beaches their family has known for generations. They call to one another in a dialect unique to them. And somewhere in that chorus, there is a voice missing.

Corky was four years old when she was taken from these waters in 1969. Captured in Pender Harbour, British Columbia, she was sold into the marine park industry and has lived in a concrete tank at SeaWorld San Diego since 1987, making her the longest-held captive orca alive today. She gave birth to seven calves in captivity. None survived.

But her family did. Her mother Stripe lived into old age in the wild. Her brother Fife, her sister Ripple, her nieces and nephews. The A5 pod still swims free, still speaks the language Corky was born into. Researchers at OrcaLab on Hanson Island have listened to them for over fifty years, keeping watch, keeping hope.

My creative process for this piece begins with sound. I work from the actual vocalizations of orcas, translating their calls and clicks into visible form through sound waves and spectrograms, which I integrate into the hand drawings as abstract markings and as the contours of her body itself. For orcas, sound is sight. They navigate, hunt, recognize family, and hold their world together through acoustic perception in a way that mirrors how we rely on vision on land. Rendering Corky through the very signals her pod still broadcasts across the Johnstone Strait felt like the truest way to bring her home, even on canvas. Her body becomes a song. The water around her becomes the voices calling her back.

This piece imagines Corky home, dreaming herself back into the green-blue water, back into the calls of her kin, back into the wild coast that has never stopped being hers. It is a vision, but it is not a fantasy. The Double Bay Sanctuary Initiative (doublebaysanctuary.org) are working to make a seaside sanctuary in her home waters a reality, a place where Corky could finally retire to the sea. 

She remembers. Her family remembers. We owe her the chance to come home.

PS:Portion of the Sales of this piece will be donated to “The Double Bay Sanctuary”