Race to the Sea

During the summer of 2008 I had an opportunity to visit the country of Costa Rica with a group of students/teachers through Miami University’s Green Teacher Workshop. While in Costa Rica, we spent two nights at a location in the northeast of the country along the shores of the Caribbean Sea called Tortuguero or “place of the turtles.” Here we watched as green sea turtles came ashore to nest. It was this experience that inspired me to sculpt several sea turtle pieces including the sculpture entitled “Race to the Sea”.

Race to the Sea is a sculpture of a mass hatching of eggs from a green sea turtle. When green sea turtle eggs hatch they do so in mass. The nests may contain an average of 110 eggs each. The nest is a foot or more deep. All of these eggs are incubated by the heat from the sun and depending on species, nest depth and temperature, they will hatch in about two months. The newly hatched turtles “swim” upward through the sand toward the surface and emerge on the beach in groups of twenty to one hundred. They take a moment to orient themselves and then turn and begin their “race to the sea”.