"Talk Story" with 2023 Artist in Residence Gar Waterman

Thursday, January 19th / 4-5 PM

In the Hui Solarium

Join us in welcoming 2023 Artist in Residence Gar Waterman! During his 6-week residency, sculptor Gar Waterman will unite visual art and science to engage the community in the discovery, celebration, and conservation of Hawai‘i’s marine ecosystems. Gar will be creating a sculpture of a nudibranch from local wood. Come meet Gar and learn more about the marine creatures inspiring his work!

This talk is free and open to the public!

Mahalo to the Laila Twigg-Smith Art Fund of Hawai‘i Community Foundation for their support of the Hui’s Artist in Residence Program!

Gar Waterman was born in Maine and grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with a formative year in Tahiti at the age of 9 to 10, where his father, pioneer underwater filmmaker Stan Waterman, documented the adventure in a National Geographic Special. This watershed year of almost daily contact with the marine life of the barrier reefs of the South Pacific established a visual foundation of marine imagery that endures as a primary source of inspiration for his sculpture. After college at Dartmouth, Waterman lived for seven years in Pietrasanta, Italy where he learned to carve stone, eventually returning to establish West Rock Studio in New Haven, CT, where his work explores form in nature with a combination of observation of natural phenomena, sensual devotion to the tactile possibilities of material, and a model maker’s tinkering sensibility. Firsthand experience over a lifetime of diving infuses his sculpture with marine forms, from fish, nudibranchs, and squid to the spiral perfection of shells.