Aloha!

Welcome Aboard Small And Tender Craft, the little research vessel I've fashioned to navigate the seas of this luscious life. My goal is to show you how I learn about science, which is to draw it.

My pen and ink explications of science are the love children of graphic novels and dissection manuals. They explore the technicalities and history of image-capturing instrumentation, the first creature encountered with a new underwater innovation, the personalities on a research vessel. There is such drama in the research experience. I discuss the role research plays in the human relationship to other creatures via illustration with the intent to make scientific concepts accessible to a general audience that largely believes itself science illiterate.

I yearn for the days of yore when everybody was an amateur naturalist, and the world was any illustrator’s oyster. People discovered how things worked by drawing what they found. I drew my way through my biology degree at Brown University.

My goal is to invite the lay audience to reclaim science as an intimate practice of embracing the world. I am for a people’s science. In my graphic stories I’m interested in illustrating that there are many ways to do things besides the ways we do them, and they’re all perfectly acceptable. I’m interested in the pause a microscope experience of a cnidarian elicits- can there be an existence with no conception of individuality? What is the relationship like between a full-grown female and an egg-sized male? My calling is to illuminate, to represent the voiceless, minute, creative explosions of life that guide me to continue expanding my perspective.

On the site, you'll get to see the wonders of oozing organisms as I see them: an inattentive child flitting to this or that new fascination. Next week we'll go to London, to the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, and the History of Surgery Museum.