Can you hear the Ocean within a Shell?

I am captivated by the evocative patterns, codes, and beauty of seashells. Who and what are they? Small earthly creatures, millions of them. Capable of exquisite design and construction. Precise. Mathematical. Inventive. Shells represent unceasing evolution over the past 500 million years. This process could continue on and on into the planet’s future. Humanity’s past valuation of shells occurred at a confluence of art, culture, and science.

Botticelli’s Venus. The cowries currency of Africa. The shell of St. James, the fisherman disciple of Christ. Closing one of his Taliesin Lectures, Frank Lloyd Wright described the seashell as the “housing with exactly what we lack- inspired form.” Shells were once the treasured objects for the wealthy on summer trips to the sea, but they have always been accessible and collected by coastal and island peoples regardless of economic class or culture. They are the essence of accessibility and simplicity, a “gift of the sea” wrote Anne Morrow Lindberg. Shells have a heritage of stimulating the beholder to find a playful solution to the great mysteries at the source of their creation.