Description

Entangled Humpback with No Name

On Mission 13 in October 2025, fifteen miles off the Golden Gate Bridge, our Bayquest SeaSounds team spotted a humpback whale tangled in fishing gear. We reported it immediately to The Marine Mammal Center and the California Academy of Sciences and dropped a hydrophone into the water to listen. The whale was vocalizing. The trained whale entanglement response crew arrived on scene, and through hours of careful, painstaking work, they partially freed her. A few lines of gear remained, but loose enough that she would likely shed them on her own as she traveled.

This day meant everything to me. Just a few years earlier, we cofounded the SeaSounds project, never quite knowing what it would become or who it would help. On this day, it helped give a whale her life back. There is no feeling like it, and I have never been more prouder of my team.

As with my other work, the creative process for this piece begins with sound. I worked from humpback vocalizations recorded on the water that day, translating their calls into visible form through sound waves and spectrograms, which I integrated into the painting as abstract markings and as the contours of her body itself. For whales, sound is sight. They navigate, communicate, and hold their world together through acoustic perception in a way that mirrors how we rely on vision on land. Rendering her through the very signals she sent into the deep felt like the truest way to honor what happened that day, the moment her voice carried up through the hydrophone and called help to her side.

This piece shows her free, breaching, the way she should be. The background carries the deep blue-green waters of the San Francisco coast where the rescue unfolded, the same waters that almost held her under. I left her unnamed because she is one of countless whales who pass through these waters carrying the weight of human gear on their bodies. She is herself, and she is also all of them. The ones who were freed, the ones who weren’t, and the ones still out there now, swimming with rope cutting into them as you read this.

She is still free to jump. That is the whole story, and it is everything.