Circumsolar Ring

2012

Navigating in a small rowing boat on a hot summer solstice afternoon in Puerto Rico, we arrived at a pristine key surrounded by starfish among the mangroves of La Parguera. There were so many starfish in such shallow, clear waters that we immediately decided to create an underwater design with them.
The gentlest way to arrange them without disturbance was in a circle, organizing them by color tone. We were surprised by how quickly they crawled away, making it a challenge to keep each one in place. To slow their movement, we flipped them upside down while organizing the rest. They slowly turned themselves upright again, buying us just enough time to finish the ring we had envisioned.

The idea was to align the color wheel with the path of the sun: warmer tones toward the east where the sun rises, shifting to deeper reds toward the west where it sets. After a few failed attempts, we perfected the method—one person sat in the center as a human radius, then exited swiftly without stirring up the seafloor once the ring was drawn. The other stood in the rowing boat with a camera ready, waiting to snap the photo the exact moment the water's surface lost its ripples. The gesture was so subtle and fleeting that the ring briefly became its own defense mechanism, conceptually a sacred vow of allegiance to its environment, symbolizing nature’s regenerative cycle. Then the starfish began to move outward at a swift pace, as if guided by an invisible centrifugal force. The ring expanded across the seafloor, finally losing its geometric shape and dissolving beneath the underwater sunlight of a summer solstice among the mangroves.