Location: Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge
It rises from the salt-stung earth, a spiral bound to the tides—a sculpture that doesn’t end because the story doesn’t end. Perpetuate Landing is not an object. It is an idea carved into the coast, where thought becomes form and form becomes shelter.
During high tide, the Pacific swallows it whole. Water slinks through its wild, curved veins, leaving shelter for crabs—tiny, armored survivors skittering against extinction. When the tide retreats, the land exhales, and the sculpture stands exposed, luminous, skeletal. It is not fragile, though it looks it. The material is calculated, deliberate, kind to the world that hosts it. Kind but unyielding.
It’s a spiral, of course. A nautilus. A helix. The endless loop of knowledge folding back on itself. DNA—our first map of what we are—reminds us that we’re still unfolding, still discovering. The sculpture doesn’t shout this. It whispers, and the ocean answers. It doesn’t ask for reverence. It simply exists, indifferent and alive, as the earth is.
And yet, there is purpose here. Perpetuate Landing is more than habitat. It speaks to the quiet arrogance of humanity, to the belief that understanding is conquest. It asks: What if understanding is not conquest but connection? What if art can bridge the gap between knowing and feeling?
There are no plaques, no neon signs to explain its meaning. That’s the point. This is not art for museums or boardrooms. It’s art that floods, erodes, grows. It forces you to stand ankle-deep in the mud, feel the salt air burn your skin, and question where you end and the world begins.
When the tide comes in and drowns it, it will still be there, waiting for the water to pull back. Its permanence is not defiance—it’s acceptance. Art doesn’t survive because it resists. It survives because it adapts, folding into the landscape like a story told in every language, half-heard, half-remembered, but always there.
This is what Perpetuate Landing asks of us: to let go of our edges, to blur into the tide, and to find what we’ve forgotten we are.
