There are some places we can’t go – maybe that’s because we shouldn’t. Maps used to say there would be monsters there, and now they don’t; but that doesn’t mean the monsters aren’t there.

​

Far from being unique to any specific place or time, stories and folklore of sea monsters are too numerous, and too well documented simply to be brushed away. The word “monster” derives from the Latin monstrum – “that which warns,” and cartographers of the Renaissance adorned the oceans of their maps with whimsical sea monsters as a warning of the unknown environment ahead.

​

Even in the twenty-first century, one of the few places that can still evoke a sense of mystery is the ocean. Thousands of feet of cold dark waters beneath the surface still creates the perfect canvas for the extrapolation of fantastic fish and denizens of the deep.

​

This body of work is a visual cacophony of whimsical and eccentric glass sea monsters which often combine traditional venetian techniques with contemporary sculpting. These twenty-first century sea monsters parallel their predecessors by drawing upon the fear and superstition of what lives beneath the water’s surface. While some of these sea monsters exist as a representation of the loss of potential discovery, others act as a facetious metaphor for the unknown state of the future of our oceans.