4. Grafting

I now turn to a different type of stitching—not of crochet yarn but of photographs in the diptychs of Vincentian artist Nadia Huggins.1 So far, Coralations has focused on exceptional corals that break common expectations about iconic Coral. Where Huggins goes further is through using corals and other marine organisms to disrupt acculturated habits of reading the gendered body in physical space. Huggins’s series Transformations (2014–2016) challenges habits of orientation and visual interpretation through a series of photographic self-portraits matched with oceanic environments and lifeforms. In her photography, corals are not just the subjects of coralations, but the agents. In particular, Huggins juxtaposes corals as extensions of limbs, shoulders, and faces (like the surrealist game “the exquisite corpse”). Through grafting marine contours to the human form, Huggins’s photography breaks normative coralations of how bodies are read in terms of gender, age, and race.

In a TEDx talk in 2017 entitled, “What’s Beyond the Shoreline?” Huggins describes the experience of identifying as a woman while growing up with alopecia, and how she was often read as a boy because of her loss of hair.2 Huggins was born in Trinidad and Tobago and grew up in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where she is currently based. Taking her camera underwater, she began to observe the ways in which the experience of immersing in the ocean assisted in undoing, or at least confusing, normative perceptions of gender. In Is that a buoy? (2015), Huggins puns on the homophone of “buoy/boy,” juxtaposing a black-and-white self-portrait of a buoy next to another portrait of her partially submerged head.3 The visual similarity between the two forms invites misreading, as well as a second look: the hint of an eyebrow, the faint wisp of an eyelash. Huggins writes that her photographs explore “the ambiguity of the body in the sea, especially when observed from a distance, and the assumptions one makes about gender and sexuality based on physical appearances [. . .] I am stereotyped as being masculine constantly because of the absence of my hair.”4 In the series Circa no future (2014 and ongoing), Huggins swam close to a group of boys who were taking turns jumping into the water, where they assumed she was just another boy.5 When she got close enough to photograph them, using an “unintrusive point and shoot” camera, she noticed that while their postures reflected normative forms of masculinity as they sat on the rocks—upright and angular—their bodies completely relaxed underneath the surface.6 As Elizabeth Deloughrey and Tatiana Flores reflect, channeling Huggins, “despite themselves, the boys’ performance of masculinity is dissolved in oceanic water.”7

It is this potential for oceanic immersion to offer the experience of relaxing acculturated habits of embodiment that focuses Huggins’s series Transformations, featuring diptychs of her underwater self-portraits juxtaposed with corals and other oceanic organisms.8 Building on her reflections on gender and comportment in Circa no future and Is that a buoy?, which were created during the same time period, Huggins writes of Transformations: “In the sea, as a woman who identifies as other, my body becomes displaced from my everyday experiences. Gender, race, and class are dissolved because there are no social and political constructs to restrain and dictate my identity. These constructs have no place or value in that environment. This idea creates the foundation for these portraits.”9 This is not to say that the constructs of race, gender, and class always disappear underwater in visual media10—rather, I read Huggins as theorizing from her own somatic experience of floating in the water, and how oceanic dehabituation comes to bear on her artistic composition of self-portraits that include marine creatures.

While Huggins refers to the diptychs in Transformations as collages, I want to think also of the way that they involve processes of grafting. Grafting is a common practice in coral conservation, where fragments of living coral are attached to underwater rocks or other structures—a botanical technique for seeding future reefs. This technique was inspired by the observation that after a destructive event like a hurricane, some broken coral fragments could begin to regrow and regenerate from living tips. By analogy, what kinds of growth might we imagine from Huggins’s photo-grafted, multispecies extensions of the human form submerged underwater?

Before I explore this question, I want to note that Huggins’s diptychs are formally different from other underwater photography of the human form and corals, perhaps most famously the underwater sculptures of Jason de Caires Taylor. At first glance, Taylor’s photographs might seem more posthuman through the materiality of marine growth on human sculptural forms. Yet Taylor’s underwater sculptures are nearly all shot as portraits, as if the photographer were standing on the seafloor, just as they would stand on land. As I write in Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater (2020), the orientation of such portraiture reflects a terrestrial experience of gravity, rather than other possible oceanic conditions of viewing: floating overhead or being swept along one’s side by changing currents.11 Although Huggins’s photographs also feature vertical orientations of the human on the left portrait in the diptych, they are always juxtaposed with a vertically flipped orientation of the coral or other marine organism on the right. Her formal choice to rotate the marine images by ninety degrees raises the question: when each pair of photographs is seen together, where is viewer in relation to the surface of the ocean? Specifically, how to read the white gap between the human and the oceanic lifeform?

This question of “where is the surface?” becomes especially important when we consider how Huggins’s photographs deny perhaps the signature aspect of portraits: the human face. Through strategic cropping, Huggins creates self-portraits that are always partial aspects of her body, featuring perhaps just a shoulder, or a side view of her head that stops at the ear, the back of her hand—or if including her face, making sure it is backlit into undiscernible shadow. Grafted to these partial views of her body are marine extensions—urchins, sponges, brain corals, rocks encrusted with marine invertebrates—seen askew. Each grafting is carefully placed in a way that matches borders and colors to match Huggins’s skintone and contours, producing the perhaps uncanny visual sensation of new kinds of living form. As Deloughrey and Flores write, “Huggins adopts a kind of diffractional ethics that eschews the unmarked observer and instead positions herself in relation to her subjects, considering her impact on their behavior and their interface.”12 Here, the interface is the graft between Huggins and each marine organism, a pluripotent site of identity formation. These are chimeric diptychs, photo-graftings which suture two forms into an emergent compound being.

I want to suggest that Huggins’s marine photography is more trans~human in the prepositional sense of the prefix trans~ (using the tilde, not the dash) that Adela C. Licona and Eva Hayward theorize13—rather than Ray Kurzweil’s obsession with transcending the body. For Licona and Hayward, the prefix trans~ draws from a double reference to transsexuality and the transoceanic, which they describe as “a crossing of spacetime, a movement within relationship,” and a “refusing to dissolve difference in favor of recognizing coalitional modes of emergence as possibilities.”14 In Huggins’s photography, the gap between the two portraits in each diptych is precisely what holds such trans~human difference, and directionality, open. Huggins reflects on the gap in the following way:

This space represents a transient moment where I am regaining buoyancy and separating from the underwater environment to resurface. My intention with these photographs is to create a lasting breath that defies human limitation. The transformation exists within the space in between photographs. It is in this moment that the viewer makes the decision if both worlds are able to separate or merge.15

Huggins suggests that we interpret each gap between photos not only spatially but temporally—a “transient moment” where she is about to “resurface.” She figures each temporal gap as a “a lasting breath” between moments or images. It is this breath or pause that Huggins imagines is shared with the viewer, who is positioned to decide if both air and ocean worlds “are able to separate or merge.” It also leaves open the directionality of time: are we to read the photographs left to right, or right to left? Is the human becoming-oceanic in a trajectory to further submerge underwater, or are oceanic lifeforms merging into a human body that is about to surface?

The photograph I am particularly struck by is “Transformations No. 3,” which features a close-up of Huggins’s bare shoulder—close enough to see soft creases and small moles. The image cuts off just before we see her the curve of her deltoid, which is visually completed by the juxtaposition of a round lobe of yellowish-green brain coral in the right portrait. The alignment of collarbone into a rounded shoulder of brain coral is perfectly matched, a graft of marine organism onto human form—or, to take Huggins’s own reflections seriously—perhaps a detachment or budding of the brain coral off of the human form. The gap is what leaves both interpretive possibilities open. The fact that this is brain coral also matters, suggesting a relocation or exteriorization of cognition out of the head and onto the hub of an appendage. Such an arrangement is evocative of octopuses, which have both a brain and significant clusters of neurons at the base of each arm. For a brain-like structure to exist in the shoulder suggests a new hierarchy of thought, not centered behind an expressive human face but in the mechanical hinge of an appendage prior to movement—a coincidence, perhaps, of the limb and the limbic.

Huggins’s photo-grafts in Transformations model how cultural correlations—of the gendered body, of embodied thought—can be undone by corals through the grafts of photographic collage. This is a different kind of grafting than we normally see in conservation discourses. Whereas the conservationist goal of coral grafting focuses on reproducing coral through fragmentation as a solution to diminishing reefs, in Huggins’s work, it is the human body that we see in fragments and parts, juxtaposed with larger corals and other underwater formations. But it is important to remember that these are self-portraits extended by the oceanic other. The grafting of human fragment and oceanic lifeform is both intimate and disorienting, calling into question the location of the artwork: where is the ocean’s surface and to what horizon do we orient? In my view, it is possible that the oceanic surface is in the middle of the diptychs—the very gap of separation between images that Huggins calls a “lasting breath that defies human limitation,” and within which the viewer might dwell for an impossible duration.

Notes

1. 1. I have Maria Molano Parrado to thank for connecting me with Nadia Huggins’s photograph during the summer course I taught on “Coral Mediations” at the University of Bologna in 2022.

2. 2. Nadia Huggins, “What’s Beyond the Boundary of the Shoreline?” https://www.ted.com/talks/nadia_huggins_what_s_beyond_the_boundary_of_the_shoreline.

3. 3. In another cultural pun on buoy/boy, consider this verse from Kate Bush’s “And Dream of Sheep”: “Little light shining / Little light will guide them to me / My face is all lit up / My face is all lit up / If they find me racing white horses / They’ll not take me for a buoy.” My thanks to Stefan Helmreich for the reference.

4. 4. Nadia Huggins, “Is That a Buoy?” https://nadiahuggins.com/Is-that-a-buoy.

5. 5. Elizabeth Deloughrey and Tatiana Flores, “Submerged Bodies: The Tidalectics of Representability and the Sea in Caribbean Art,” Environmental Humanities 12, no. 1 (2020): 152: “In a conversation with one of the authors, Huggins explained that the first time she swam toward the boys they assumed that she was also a boy so they behaved in a manner that was wholly free of constraint. When they noticed that she was female, they began posturing.”

6. 6. Deloughrey and Flores, 152; Nadia Huggins, “What’s Beyond the Boundary of the Shoreline?”

7. 7. Deloughrey and Flores, “Submerged Bodies,” 152.

8. 8. In Wild Blue Media (2020), I also discuss the potential of the ocean as an environment for drawing attention to normative habits of embodiment formed in terrestrial contexts.

9. 9. Nadia Huggins, Transformations, https://nadiahuggins.com/Transformations.

10. 10. For example, Ann Elias notes the common racialization and gendering of the prone horizontal body in early twentieth-century photography; see for example chapter 10 of Coral Empire.

11. 11. Jue, Wild Blue Media, 146–52.

12. 12. Deloughrey and Flores, “Submerged Bodies,” 157.

13. 13. Adela C. Licona and Eva S. Hayward, “Trans~Waters~ Coalitional Thinking on Art + Environment,” https://www.terrain.org/2014/currents/trans-waters-coalitional-thinking-on-art-and-environment/.

14. 14. Licona and Hayward.

15. 15. Huggins, “Transformations.”