Sockeye

Children's book / artist book about the life cycle of the Sockeye salmon. 

“As it is for most creatures on earth, life as a salmon is difficult, and living long enough to procreate can seem nothing short of a miracle.”
- Dale Stokes, The Fish in the Forest

Sockeye was my graduate school thesis, completed and exhibited at George Mason University in December 2015.

During a rainy October visit to the Ballard Locks in Seattle, I saw a lone silver salmon ascend one of the city’s salmon ladders. Somehow, I had never heard about the salmon— that they travel impossible distances away from their homes only to return years later to the exact same coordinates, that only about one in a thousand survive the journey, that their skin turns an unbelievable shade of red as they swim. My first thought was that a children’s book should exist to capture the poetry and magic of this story, and when I couldn’t find one in the Locks gift shop (or anywhere else on the internet), I decided to attempt the upstream swim myself.

Research for this project consisted of reading many texts about salmon ecology and studying every beautiful children’s book I could find. I discovered that “children’s book that resonates with adults” is my favorite genre, and the one I hoped Sockeye might be filed under.

Production Notes:
Size: 60 8x10 pages (40 feet long!).
Images: Digitally-manipulated monoprints.
Type: Andron 2 ABC Corpus & Lato.
Printing: Inkjet on Canson BFK Rives.
Binding: Kozo.
Mentors: Jandos Rothstein, Helen Frederick, Lou Stovall, Juana Medina.