Marine Snow
I’ve spent years as a designer—organizing, shaping, creating clarity from complexity. And now as a painter—letting go of control, working through instinct, material, and feeling. This project asked me to do both at once. Not just do them—but let them speak to each other.
Mary’s writing pulled me in immediately. It wasn’t just poetry—it was movement through something. Healing, fragmentation, longing, return. You can feel it line by line. There’s a raw honesty that doesn’t try to resolve too quickly. It stays in the tension. That’s what I connected to.
And I realized—I don’t just relate to that.
That’s exactly what I paint.
So the artwork for the cover—and the language of the whole book—had to hold that same experience.
Layers.
Not decorative layers. Real ones.
Painted tea papers—thin, translucent, fragile.
Glass—sharp, reflective, embedded.
Resin—fluid, moving, sealing, distorting.
Everything slightly visible. Nothing fully hidden.
It became a visual parallel to what Mary is doing with words: holding memory, emotion, and time in layers that don’t flatten out.
The layouts couldn’t be static. The pages needed to move. To breathe. To feel like currents rather than containers. The way the text sits within shifting forms—the way imagery interrupts and supports it—mirrors the internal landscape the poems navigate.
There’s something deeply satisfying about that kind of problem-solving:
How do you guide someone through an emotional experience without controlling it?
How do you create structure that still feels fluid?
That’s where design feels most alive to me.
We printed both softcover and hardcover at Barnes & Noble. Holding them—feeling the weight, the surface, the way the imagery wraps—it felt real in a different way than a painting on the wall.
It felt shared.
And honestly… it belongs on shelves.
Not just because it’s beautifully made—
but because it holds something people need.
This project reminded me that my work doesn’t live in one lane.
It moves between disciplines, just like the themes I’m drawn to—
between control and release, structure and flow, surface and depth.
Between what is seen
and what is felt underneath.
That’s what Marine Snow is about—
Fragments drifting down,
layering over time,
quietly becoming part of something deeper.
